Even though the pickup is dragging a long section of pipeline, the buffalo run toward it when they see us coming. “Normally when I show up they’re getting moved. Wherever I go is where they want to go,” Phil says. The buffalo are so used to moving that all Phil has to do is open the gate and lead them through with the pickup.
Once they realize they aren’t being moved, the buffalo fan out on the hillside to graze. They look scraggily; it’s that awkward time in the spring when they don’t have sleek summer coats and are still shedding their thick winter hair. Bits of it are half-detached, clinging to their skin. Some are young, some are old. Most have curved black horns. The calves are tan, while the mothers are chocolate brown with camel-like humps. The hair around the cows’ teats is wet and matted where the calves have been nursing. Everyone has beards and long skinny legs. They look sort of like African wildebeests, exotic and wild. I’m so unused to seeing the prairie’s original grazer, the former keystone species, that they look foreign.
The Jerdes bought their first buffalo cows in 1999. Why buffalo? I ask. “Because they are just so cool,” Phil says with a grin. At the time buffalo were popular, a trend that offered the potential for high profits, and many ranchers jumped into the market. “They were expensive,” Phil admits. And then the market crashed. “Within about three years the calves were worth fifty dollars. It was a wreck. But we had some help; the folks helped us out. And then we hit the drought about the same time.” He’s referring to the drought of 2002–6. “So we had a lot of animals that weren’t worth anything and not much grass to feed them. It was kind of a perfect storm. But now they’re worth some money, which is a good thing.”
Buffalo meat is naturally lean, containing less fat than other red meat, white meat, and salmon. An average 3.5-ounce serving of cooked bison has 2.42 grams of fat. Compare that to the same size serving of choice beef at 18.54 grams of fat, select beef at 8.09 grams, pork at 9.21 grams, skinless chicken at 7.41 grams, and sockeye salmon at 6.69.1 Phil is a proponent of “grass fat,” or eating the meat of grass-fed animals rather than grain-fed animals. Grass fat, he says, is good for the body, and he is dismayed that consumers sometimes write off meat altogether because of health effects—effects that he argues come from grain fat put on in feedlots, not grass fat. “If you are gonna eat feedlot fat, then yeah, eat a low-fat diet,” Phil says. “But grass fat is where it’s at.”
It’s true that meat from grain-fed animals contains higher-than-ideal fat levels that are neither good for the body nor tasty. Dan Barber, a chef as well as a writer, describes the case of American grain-fed lamb, which arrives in the kitchen with a fat cap an inch or more thick.2 At one restaurant, Barber cleaned forty racks of lamb a day, throwing 10 percent of each cut away. The French butcher Barber worked under said so much fat was disgusting. That kind of dull, fatty meat would never appear on a French table. As Barber points out, “Feeding an herbivore grain (intensively anyway) is a recent invention, and despite the fact that the practice has become so ubiquitous—and in the case of Colorado lamb, so coveted—it’s not actually delicious.”3 Under the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) system, we’ve come to equate flabby, greasy meat with delicious meat.
Meat from grass-fed animals, on the other hand, contains more heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, more conjugated linoleic acid or CLA (a type of fat that reduces heart disease and cancer), more antioxidant vitamins like vitamin E, and less total fat and calories than its corn-fed counterpart.4 Grass-fed livestock that never see the inside of a CAFO can be part of a healthy diet, not to mention part of healthy grassland. I should say that Phil, Jill, and their children eat this kind of meat almost every day and are in tip-top physical shape. So are their animals. When the soil improves, grass nutrition improves. When grass nutrition improves, animal health improves, meaning animals fend off sickness and put on weight more effectively. The healthier the animal, the healthier the person who eats it.
“I think all the disease is nutrition, or lack thereof,” Phil says. “We do purchase some salt and minerals for the livestock. Back during the huge herds of buffalo, they would pass through areas that would be deficient in selenium and then make up for it by going to areas that had too much selenium, for example. Once we put all these fences in and limit the movement of livestock, it’s bound to create shortages of certain minerals, which is going to lead to consequences for herd health. So we still are supplementing some minerals, and will be.” Minerals are Phil’s first line of defense against sickness. He doesn’t administer preventative vaccinations, and if a buffalo gets sick, he doesn’t turn to conventional medicine. “Actually, the only shot we give is the brucellosis Bangs vaccination and that’s more a matter of if we want to sell them out of state; otherwise you can’t sell them out of state to a lot of states,” he says.5
Some might cringe at Phil’s philosophy, seeing his approach as cruel because he doesn’t step in right away to help sick animals. He explains his view through an example: he and a friend were running cows in the same pasture. The friend’s cattle developed pinkeye, and a few of Phil’s cows got it, too. Phil didn’t “monkey” with his cattle, a rancher’s term for “mess with,” but his friend doctored his animals with antibiotics. The friend spent a day rounding up the cattle, running them through a chute, and administering the vaccine, a process that caused further stress on the cows. Phil’s cows healed up in ten days. The friend’s cows healed up in a week—a negligible time difference to Phil. “You can either put antibiotics in the animal and have them heal up in seven days, or not and have them heal up in ten days,” he says. “Why do we bother doing a lot of the things that we do?”
He offers another example. He once bought some buffalo heifers and put them in with his herd. The new heifers started dying. Turns out they were full of worms. Phil asked the rancher who sold him the heifers how they had been raised, and he learned they had been living in a big pasture all summer—conventional grazing. Keeping livestock in the same pasture for too long means they are more likely to contract worms because they are exposed to multiple stages of the worm cycle, as Phil explains. “The egg is pooped out, the worm hatches, crawls up the plant leaf, and is there for the next animal to eat and start the process again. What we’re doing [on our ranch] is, if that’s pooped out, there isn’t an animal to consume the next stage of the worm issue. In that instance, we brought those animals back in and wormed them, but it’s not a practice we would employ because it’s not necessary under our management.”
Still, some animals get sick and die. The hard truth is that a ranch is like the natural world: there is death from weather, predators, diseases, and old age. Because of their diet, Phil’s livestock are healthy enough to fend off most ailments. Some can’t, but that doesn’t mean Phil is doing something wrong. No rancher can prevent all deaths, no matter how many inputs he or she uses. “Nature’s model isn’t that 100 percent of everything lives,” Phil says. “So do animals die in our system? Yes. But they only die once. It’s just a one-time deal.”
In other words, death by a cause conventional medicines might have prevented is better than life in the conventional system because it leads, for most livestock, to a CAFO—a place where death is not “a one-time deal,” but arguably occurs little by little over many torturous months.
We can see a broad picture of the CAFO system by looking at the life of a typical conventional beef steer. The steer is usually conceived on a cow-calf operation like my parents’ ranch, the industry term for ranches stocked with breeding cows that give birth to calves each year. The rancher turns the cows and bulls out to pasture for the grazing season, and healthy cows come back pregnant. Some ranchers artificially inseminate the cows instead. Whatever the case, our steer is born about 280 days later. Cows raise their calves on pasture until they are about six to ten months old, when the rancher weans them away from their mothers.6 This is the last time our steer will eat grass.
Then he goes to a backgrounding pen on the ranch, a minifeedlot, where he learns to eat corn. He is a ruminant animal, meaning he’s designed to eat and digest grass.7 But steers fatten quickly on grain, and America’s corn and soybean growers are producing a surplus of both, making these grains relatively cheap. Ranchers also feed inexpensive, nutrition-poor, starch-heavy ethanol by-products called distiller’s dried grains. Many ranchers background because CAFOs don’t want calves fresh from the pasture—they would rather let the rancher spend time and money getting the calves closer to slaughter weight, a move that reduces the CAFO’s risk and input costs and puts the burden on the rancher. This means many ranchers have become feedlot operators, a way of tailoring their practices to fit industrial standards.
Like my dad. He backgrounds his calves for a few months before taking them to auction. That’s a fact I hate revealing to people: we run a feedlot part of the year, which sounds (and is) much less noble than simply being a cow-calf operation. He feeds the calves a mixture of corn silage, ground hay, distiller’s dried grains, low-level antibiotics, and corn, just what CAFO owners want him to do. The calves require feed daily, meaning he can’t leave the ranch for more than twenty-four hours from November to February and burns expensive fuel to power the feeding equipment. He also grows GM corn that becomes silage and feed grain. Not all ranchers background, of course. The fact that my family does, though, means the meat we eat from the ranch is little better than CAFO-produced meat in the grocery store, because the calves share basically the same diet.
Let’s assume our steer is a good-sized animal after several months in the backgrounding pen. The rancher sells him with the rest of the calf crop, sometimes at auction, sometimes to a private buyer. Our steer will likely end up at a CAFO whose mission is to fatten animals for slaughter “efficiently” by keeping them in grassless feedlots and feeding them carefully controlled rations—a processing called finishing. The larger the CAFO, the thinking goes, the more efficient it is. About half of the cattle slaughtered in the United States come from just twenty giant CAFOs.8 America’s CAFO system of meat production has been called the “industrial-grain-livestock complex” because the government indirectly subsidizes industrial livestock operations through the subsidization of grain, which gives meat an artificially low price in the grocery store and encourages grain-fed, not grass-fed, meat.9 The environmental, social, ethical, and sustainability problems with CAFOs are thoroughly documented (see the film Food, Inc. and the books Fast Food Nation and CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, for example), so I’ll only mention the most troubling realities our steer is bound to endure.
First, he will eat a diet of corn, soybeans, milled grains, corn silage, maybe ethanol plant by-products, and other fillers like ground-up chicken or pig parts. These rations are usually laced with synthetic growth hormones, so animals gain weight faster, and antibiotics to preempt the diseases that come with standing and sleeping in their own manure 24/7.10 And it takes a lot of antibiotics and hormones. Of the antibiotics sold in the United States, about 80 percent are fed directly to livestock like chickens, hogs, and cattle.11 Growth hormones are banned in poultry and swine production, but their use remains legal in dairy and feeder cattle. About 80 percent of U.S. beef cattle are injected with synthetic growth hormones.12 CAFO advocates say this is efficiency at its finest—more meat in less time at a lower cost, with help from science. We used to fatten cattle slowly on grass, maybe with a little grain near the end, and slaughter them at four or five years old. Now we’ve sped the fattening up to fourteen months, sometimes less, and cut the grass out completely.13
The danger of growth hormones lurks under the surface, in some cases underwater. Researchers confirmed that hormones are routinely present in waters near CAFOs and that these hormones disrupt the reproductive behavior of fish.14 Scientists are researching whether hormone residues in meat and drinking water could cause similar hormone disruption in humans, which could lead to reproductive issues, developmental problems, and cancers already linked to hormone imbalances such as breast and prostate cancer. Happily, our steer has no knowledge of these facts, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t care because, let’s be honest, he’s got bigger problems, such as being stuck in the hell-on-earth that is a CAFO.
The constant feeding of antibiotics at low levels on such a large scale for the past sixty or so years is, as scientists confirm, encouraging antibiotic-resistant bacteria that’s showing up in human bodies. We’ve compromised humankind’s ability to fight infections because we consume antibiotics in almost every meal that includes beef, pork, chicken, or dairy. Scientists say it’s possible that antibiotics, the twentieth-century wonder drugs, will become useless in this century. The Obama administration tried in 2013 to curb use by banning antibiotics for the purpose of making livestock grow faster (one side effect of prolonged, low-level antibiotics is that animals put on weight). The administration also required producers to get a prescription for antibiotics from a veterinarian before treating sick animals. But lawmakers left a giant loophole: producers can simply argue that they use antibiotics to prevent sickness, which doesn’t require a prescription, meaning the situation is essentially unchanged.15 People in other countries are understandably terrified at the prospect of losing antibiotics. The European Union in 2006 fully banned their use in animal feed, though some of its member countries had antibiotic bans in place for decades prior. Nor does the EU want its citizens ingesting synthetic growth hormones in meat or water, so the use of hormones is also illegal. Since 1989 the EU has banned the import of beef containing growth hormones, which is mainly U.S. beef.
Hormones and antibiotics aren’t the only problems. Of the pesticide residues North Americans consume, 55 percent originate from meat and 23 percent from dairy.16 But how can livestock-derived food contain pesticides, which are sprayed on field crops? The answer lies in the conventional grain CAFOs feed to the animals. About 80 percent to 90 percent of the CAFO diet is corn.17 This grain is chock-full of pesticide residue, and as animals eat the grain the leftover chemicals accrue in their flesh. Considering that meat consumption has risen dramatically in the U.S. over the last one hundred years, and the use of pesticides has increased along with it, it’s safe to say that our bodies are more toxic than ever. So are the cattle we’re eating. Grain-heavy diets make cattle sick because their rumens stop functioning, causing bloat. Their rumens also acidify and develop ulcers. The biggest issue is usually the liver, which develops abscesses and shuts down. This is why cattle only stay in the CAFO for a few months—they would die if forced to live on corn much longer.18
So we’re eating sick, pesticide- and hormone-filled animals and expecting to stay healthy. The absurdity of that thinking isn’t lost on Phil. “We’re created to be healthy; we’re not created to be sick. When we are fed things that keep us healthy, we tend to be healthy. Same is true of our animals,” Phil says. “But if we are going to go eat McDonald’s and drink liters of soda pop, you can expect to need a lot of healthcare. The same is true of our animals. If we are going to feed them distiller’s waste, we can expect to reap what we sow. We can expect some problems healthwise with that. When we load up a rumen, which is made to process grasses, on starch, we can expect problems with that.”
Phil has a story that confirms how sick these feedlot animals actually are. Several years ago, during the winter and not terribly far from the Jerde ranch, a semi-truck carrying feeder calves tipped over on a curvy, narrow road. Miraculously most of the calves lived, but a few died. One body was left behind, having fallen too deep into a gully to be retrieved. In western South Dakota there is much talk about the supposedly out-of-control coyotes, which presumably would have devoured a dead calf during the cold winter. “Up in the hills, with all these coyotes, nothing would touch that animal,” Phil says. “Nothing would eat it. That’s a finished grain-fed beef coming out of Canada to be processed in the States. Even our scavengers won’t eat it. That’s what is being fed to us as USDA Choice. I should have taken a picture because it stayed there all winter long. What can they sense that we don’t? And we’re the advanced ones supposedly. We’ll lose a buffalo from time to time and you come back a week later and it’s stripped down to bones, it’s spread out.”
Where does Great Plains Buffalo fit into this CAFO-driven meat production system? Phil raises buffalo, not cattle, so his situation is different—but not so different that industrial processes haven’t been adapted for buffalo. Of the roughly sixty-one thousand buffalo slaughtered each year, the majority are grain-finished in feedlots, a reflection of the agribusiness determination to stick with the grain model and even apply it to a wild animal.19 It’s also a reflection of consumers, who want buffalo to taste and look like corn-fed beef. Buffalo meat is by no means gamey, but it is leaner. Consumers who see thick marbling and fat caps as signs of quality are often disappointed with buffalo, interpreting its meaty taste as inferior.
Even the anti-CAFO Phil sometimes has to sell some animals to feedlot operators because they are the major buyers. Most of the time, though, he sells live animals to people wanting to finish them on grass and eventually slaughter them. That way he participates in the regenerative meat system. He’s also sold live cattle and buffalo to people who want to start their own ranches. But he can’t always find such buyers. “If I could never send another animal to a feedlot, I’d be there,” Phil says. “Right now I’m not there. I got mortgages to pay and whatnot, so sometimes animals get sold that way.”
To Phil, selling live animals is good, but selling meat would be better. “Ideally I would like to produce grass-fattened food, grass-fattened animals, right off the place and market directly,” he says. The problem is that there’s no one around to buy it. Remember, the ranch is hours from the nearest urban center. “I don’t know how you get around it out here,” he says. “There just isn’t a large population of people. We’ve played around with marketing some of our own buffalo, and grass-fed beef for that matter, but getting around transportation costs is just a huge deal. Right now we’re just shipping the animals off and letting someone else take that enterprise on who knows what they’re doing.”
Phil faces an even larger hurdle, though: the conventional slaughter system. It’s illegal to slaughter animals on the ranch and retail the meat. Producers can only sell meat processed in a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse, which is usually far away, and very few slaughterhouses are small enough to accept animals from individual ranchers anyway. Like CAFOs, the megaslaughterhouses that process our meat have a hand in the market—a heavier hand than most of us realize.