The seed is in the clover,
The ear is in the shuck,
The melons shout, “Come Out, come out,
And eat this garden-truck.”
The yellow ears are for the steers,
The white are for the swine;
Their hair and hides and bacon sides
Are all for me and mine.
—from “Joy in the Corn Belt,”
by C. L. Edson (1916)
While there are numerous ways to prepare and enjoy corn, the vast majority of corn grown in this country is actually not consumed by humans—or, to be more precise, it is not directly consumed by humans. Most of the corn crop in the United States goes to feed livestock, especially large livestock (pigs and cows) and poultry.
No other plant is better at capturing and storing the sun’s energy than corn,1 and as a result, no other plant is as good at supplying the calories needed to fatten animals or enable them to produce milk or eggs. Corn is, in fact, the only plant used for animal feed that can fully meet the caloric needs of large livestock. Only minor supplementation is needed to meet most animals’ nutritional needs. This is true even in cases where the corn does not fully mature and the entire plant is chopped up as silage.2 Fortunately, it is also a favorite food of just about everything that eats plants. As English traveler William Oliver wrote in 1843, “Everything, down to the dog and cat, [is] fond of the grain.”3
I suspect that for many people, the first time they were exposed to the truth that animals love corn was in the story The Yearling—and who can forget when Jody had to shoot his pet deer, Flag. No matter what obstacles, no matter how high the fences, Flag managed to get into the corn crop—because that deer really wanted to eat the corn.
At least it was easy to decide what to feed domestic animals. Once European settlers had enough grain to feed themselves, sharing the abundance with livestock made sense. However, long before feeding animals became one of the key points of raising corn, keeping animals away from the corn was an issue. Even domestic animals had to be kept from getting into the fields. In the East, where trees were plentiful, fences were readily built. In the Midwest, on plains and prairies where trees were scarce, farmers initially hauled in wood for split rails and then tried planting hedges or digging ditch-and-bank fences. Farmers spent an estimated two dollars on fences for every one dollar spent on land.4 It was the invention of barbed wire that finally solved the problem. (Lots of people experimented with wire fences, but Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, got his version patented in 1874.) Initially, cattlemen weren’t happy with the barbed wire, which separated farms from open range and made cattle drives more difficult, but in time, everyone figured out that fences made both farming and ranching more manageable.5 (And fences didn’t just protect the crops. They protected the animals. If horses or cows got in and ate all they wanted, they could founder. Their systems can’t handle huge amounts of such concentrated food in undiluted form.)6 Eventually, the number of fences would diminish, as confining the animals was found to be more effective than fencing all the land under cultivation. However, in the 1800s, the invention of barbed wire was a huge boon to farmers.
Corn isn’t the only thing livestock eats, even so-called corn-fed animals. Right from the start, grazing animals (dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep) could enjoy pastures during the summer, and pigs could forage or be fed leftovers, but in the northern half of the United States, there had to be something for animals to live on during the winter. Hay would generally make up part of what was dried and stored (more so for smaller animals, such as sheep and goats), but corn offered a lot more calories.7 On top of that, feeding marketable animals was seen as one of the easiest ways of getting corn to market. There might never be enough wagons to get crops to town, but pigs (also often referred to as “corn on the hoof” or “cornfields with legs”) could walk. Fatten a pig on corn, and the corn got to market on its own—albeit in a transformed state. It was one of the two most common ways of getting corn to market in the early 1800s, the other being corn whiskey.
Pigs were the first corn-fed animals to become commercially valuable in the United States. Because pork was the most common meat available throughout Europe, pork was what most Europeans thought of when meat was mentioned. Pork was close to ubiquitous largely because pigs were (and are) easy to raise. In Europe, they were raised in urban settings, where they lived off of garbage in the street, and in rural areas, where they could be allowed to forage for food. In the Midwest, with so much corn available, pigs never had to search for their next meal. As a result, they were accessible and affordable for just about everyone. Plus pork was easy to preserve, in the form of pickled pork, ham, bacon, salt pork, and sausage.
Stowing a few little pigs on ships headed for the New World offered few difficulties, and because only rabbits breed more prolifically than pigs, a few pigs (or rather, hogs, since a pig is a pig only until it reaches sexual maturity) could soon turn into a massive herd. Up until the Civil War, pork was the country’s most important domestic meat.8 Hogs were herded along the trails that led eastward. A great drive might include riders on horseback, a few head of cattle, and a thousand hogs. Packhorses would carry furs, corn whiskey, and enough corn to feed men and animals. Up and over the Allegheny Mountains they would go, and down to growing, meat-hungry cities of the Eastern Seaboard.9
As was the case back in Europe, once processed, most pork was salted, and a lot of it was smoked, as well. Salt pork, bacon, and ham could be shipped without refrigeration around the world. Salt pork was the main meat everywhere, from the farm to ships at sea to the markets in Europe. Families might have chickens, which would also be fed corn, but it was pigs that could make a farmer successful—and corn made raising pigs cost-effective.
Once midwestern settlement began to spread onto the Great Plains, people realized that the golden grasses that supported the bison herds could just as easily support herds of domestic beef cattle. While cattle had moved into the Old Northwest Territory with settlers from the East, cattle ranching originally moved into the Great Plains by way of Texas, which also contributed to the cowboy heritage.10 However, there were a few bumps in the road at the outset.
In the 1860s, Texas cattlemen were eager to get cattle to Chicago, where they would bring far higher prices than at home. However, the proximity of longhorns brought widespread death to northern herds, so Texans soon found their trails blocked by Midwest cattle ranchers. The longhorns from Texas were immune to the tick-borne disease known as Texas fever; Midwestern shorthorns were not. Cattle dealer Joseph G. McCoy, of Springfield, Illinois, figured that the railroads could help solve this problem. He got the Kansas Pacific Railroad to build stockyards in Kansas. From there, trains could carry the Texas cattle to Chicago without ever going near midwestern cattle. In 1867, thirty-five thousand head made the trip north, and the tradition of driving cattle to purpose-built Kansas cow towns along rail lines—towns with names iconically associated with cattle drives, such as Wichita and Dodge City—was born.11
However, the longhorns were about to hit a bigger snag—one that could not be resolved. When ranchers in Missouri tried to use corn to fatten longhorns for market, they found that it didn’t work. The cattle raised through most of the Corn Belt were shorthorn varieties that had been improved over a hundred years, bred from English stock. So there were specific types of Corn Belt cattle. The improved shorthorns spread everywhere corn fattening was practiced—and longhorns stayed in Texas.12
However, beef cattle didn’t become a dominant force in meat production (or on the dinner table) until after the Civil War.13 Even as late as the 1930s, “hogs and hominy” were being produced by more than 60 percent of the nation’s farmers, and more than 40 percent of the corn being raised went to producing pork and lard. The fact that there were approximately 45 million hogs at that time gives some idea how much corn was being transformed into those “cornfields with legs.”14 (Today, the country is home to well over 65 million hogs,15 so even with increased consumption of beef and lamb, hogs are still big business. And they’re still eating corn.) So closely allied were corn and pork in the Midwest that celebrating one meant celebrating the other. When Sioux City, Iowa, built their first corn palace in 1887, it was announced that they were honoring the crop that had made them the dominant force in the region’s pork market.16
Keeping in mind that feed corn for winter use needed to be stored, it’s worth noting that there were also developments in handling silage—the chopped-up green corn, stalks, and leaves that would be stored and used to feed animals once fields were covered with snow. Tall, conical storage towers first appeared around 1875, and these tower silos became virtually a symbol of American farms for a couple of generations.17 (Interesting etymological aside: the word silage comes from the French ensilage, which means “to put in a silo,” though originally, silos were pits. So the term silo existed before the conical towers did.)
The silos that predated the towers were pits or trenches dug into dry, elevated ground. (Actually, pit or trench silos still exist—because on farms with large numbers of cattle or pigs, building enough tower silos to store silage for the whole winter could be cost-prohibitive.) Both cattle and horses preferred the leaves of the corn plant to hay and clover,18 so the entire plant was harvested—stalk, leaves, and grain—while the corn was still green. This would be hauled back to the barn and chopped into short lengths before being dumped into the trench or tower. (Today, machines harvest and chop the silage in one step, and trucks carry the already chopped silage to the silos.)
In the silo, the moist green corn plants would slightly ferment, which converted the silage into a splendid feed that would last almost indefinitely. For this to work well, the silage had to be pressed down, generally by exhausting rounds of trampling by farmers or hired hands. All the air had to be squeezed out. But the work was worth it, as the final product was superior to dried hay or fodder for feeding animals during the winter.19
Often, if grain was harvested (whether for feed or human consumption), rather than the whole plant, cattle and hogs were given access to what was left in the fields. From the early days until well into the twentieth century, this was the easiest way to clean up the fields. Marie Sila, who grew up on a farm in McLean County, Illinois, remembers, “Farming has changed tremendously since I was a girl. After we harvested, we let the cattle out into the fields to graze on everything that was left. They loved the leaves and sweet stalks, as well as whatever corn might have been missed. Today, the harvesting machines are so efficient, they don’t leave anything behind for the animals to eat.” Generally, if a farmer had both hogs and cattle, the cattle would go first, then the hogs—because cattle are more particular; hogs will eat anything, including the cellulose-rich dung the cattle left behind.
Turning a field of corn into silage supplies 50 to 60 percent more nutrients per acre than harvesting grain alone, which makes silage popular among many cattle feeders. Silage also helps cattle with the transition from grass to feed with higher grain content,20 because grain was and is used as feed, too. In the early 1800s, farmers discovered that crushing the ears of corn, kernels still attached to cobs, was a better way to feed livestock than just giving them grain. It added plenty of beneficial fiber to the feed, and it was more efficient—they could skip the step of shelling the corn.21 Grain feeding was in addition to silage and hay—because animals can get too many calories, and feeding livestock was, and is, all about getting the right balance of protein, starch, roughage, and other nutrients.
“Corn, when it dries down, has starch in an easily digestible form,” notes Malcolm DeKryger, vice president of Belstra Milling Company, an Indiana feed company that also operates six pig farms. “And you don’t need to cook the corn to make the starch available. Just dry it and grind it. Pigs are unique in that they can eat corn in many forms, either straight from the field or the by-products of baking or making ethanol—which is great for us raising pigs, but is also great for the environment, because all these by-products would otherwise go to landfill. Pigs are the ultimate recycling machines.”
DeKryger, who has a master’s degree in monogastric nutrition (that is, nutrition for animals with one stomach, such as pigs, versus cows and sheep, which have four stomachs), explains,
All that the pigs care about is that they get the same quality and taste in the same amounts, plus as much clean water as they want. If you feed them one thing and then change suddenly, they’ll turn their noses up at it. Feeding pigs is very different from feeding cattle. Pigs are not ruminants. The feed blend for pigs is more like that for chickens than cattle—about three-quarters corn, plus some soybean meal and vitamins. The energy from the corn and protein from the soybeans maximize the growth of pigs. Mixing the feed like this not only makes the pigs grow efficiently, it makes consumers happy. People want consistency in the flavor and quality of their food. Standardized feed creates that consistency.
When asked about raising pigs in corn country, DeKryger replies,
It’s easy to handle corn and livestock in the same area. There is no processing of the corn to feed the animals, and the manure from the animals is used to fertilize the corn. No waste. Really, the Midwest is the best place for this kind of operation. There is a lot of open space here. We have some of the best soils in the world. The growing season is ideal. It’s a great place to raise corn—and a great place for corn will always be a good place for pigs. Of course, the other advantage is that the open space makes it easy to stay away from towns. To be honest, most people really don’t want to be near pigs and fields. They want the meat, but they don’t want the farm.
That distancing of consumers from livestock is not new. It had its genesis in the rise of the stockyards. Prior to the creation of stockyards, individual butchers would cut meat to order from carcasses hanging in their coolers. In large cities, the local butcher would have purchased the carcass from a central warehouse. In a small town, the butcher might have had to slaughter the animal himself. Either way, there were no display cases filled with already-cut steaks from which a customer could make a choice.22
Earlier than that, farmers either butchered their own animals or neighbors would get together and share an animal, dividing both the meat and the labor. It was not uncommon for this type of work to turn into a “frolic,” much like those surrounding husking corn.23 Given that Americans were consuming about three hundred pounds of meat per person per year, primarily game and pork,24 it’s easy to understand why there was little hesitation in turning this task over to a local butcher as soon as there was a town big enough to support one.
While there was a degree to which specialization had existed for a long time, it did not really become an identifying feature of American business, and particularly of agriculture, until the years after the Civil War. Farmers would find themselves losing their independence in the rush toward centralized and increasingly efficient processing operations—operations that revolved around the rise of the stockyards and the railways and businesses that made the stockyards possible.25
As the center point of the nation’s railroad traffic, Chicago was destined to play a major role in the changes to come. However, these changes neither started in Chicago nor stayed there.
Stockyards had two primary purposes in the mid-1800s. They were the places animals were gathered before being shipped somewhere else, or the places they were kept before being processed. Most states around the Midwest had stockyards, with the biggest one being in Omaha, Nebraska. Most processing—known as meatpacking at the time—was of pork. This was because pork could be salted, smoked, pickled, or otherwise preserved. Even though beef was not so readily available, Americans already had a preference for fresh, rather than preserved, beef. Cattle, which were easier to herd than hogs, could be driven all the way to the East Coast and later could be shipped by train. East Coast butchers could process the cattle fresh for local consumption. But meatpacking focused on pork.26
Before the railroads were built, pork packers, like all others, depended on nearby rivers to move their products. Because Cincinnati, Ohio, was located at the confluence of several rivers, it had greater access to more widespread markets than the many smaller packing operations that dotted the region. With more markets, there was greater demand, so farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky drove their swine herds to Cincinnati. By 1830, Cincinnati was the biggest pork packer on the continent. It wasn’t size, however, that made the difference, but innovation. Cincinnati pioneered new ways of processing meat, creating what became known as the disassembly line. (And no, this term was not based on the concept of the assembly line; Henry Ford’s idea for the assembly line was inspired by the disassembly line.) In a disassembly line, a hog would be killed and cleaned in one area, and then a team of men would disassemble the animal into the various cuts of meat—pork bellies, hams, shoulder butts, and so on—two men turning the hog and two wielding cleavers. In no time, the hog was ready to move on to pickling, salting, or smoking. Cincinnati did all this on such a huge scale and with such efficiency that it claimed for itself the title “Porkopolis.”27
Porkopolis made it possible for farmers to market their corn through their “cornfields with legs.” Suddenly, instead of just getting by, farmers were actually earning a profit from their labors.28 Another advantage of centralized processing was that it dramatically reduced the number of communities that had to endure animals being herded through the street and the smell of slaughtering permeating the central shopping area.29
Chicago noticed, and once railroads made it possible to get away from reliance on rivers, in the 1850s, Chicago jumped on board the pork train. Cincinnati remained the giant for a while longer, with 334,000 hogs packed annually, versus Chicago’s 20,000.30 But as more railroads spun their web across the Midwest, more and more pork headed for the city Carl Sandburg would in time call the “Hog butcher for the world.”
The Civil War created a tremendous demand for pork—some of it now being processed into cans, since canning technology had become available. By the end of the war, Chicago was the new Porkopolis. By the 1870s, Chicago was processing more than a million hogs a year.31
In December 1865, the Illinois General Assembly opened the Chicago Union Stock Yards,32 which consolidated the city’s numerous yards onto one large stretch of unused swampland33 south of the city. This gave a tremendous boost to Chicago as meat central for the country. But the next big boost would be ice.
Actually, people had been harvesting ice for decades in the Midwest, as well as back east, but it was still confined to storage rooms. Then, in 1868, a pork packer from Detroit named George Hammond converted a train car designed for shipping fruit into a refrigerated vehicle that could transport beef. He successfully shipped sixteen thousand pounds of beef to Boston, and the race to improve on his idea was officially on. Hammond moved to a spot in Indiana that soon bore his name, and by 1873, Hammond, Indiana, had a beef trade doing a million dollars’ worth of business a year.34
Hammond was joined in the Midwest by a few other meatpackers, most notably Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris. It was Swift who created the concept of having a variety of precut beef on display, so customers could see what was available and select what they wanted, rather than having to ask the butcher to custom-cut a piece. Swift’s idea worked so well, everyone was soon copying this practice.35 But almost every aspect of work at the yards was revolutionized, from streamlining the disassembly line to creating new markets for by-products, such as leather, bone buttons, glue, soap, fertilizer, and sausage casings. The sale of by-products often made the difference between profit and loss. It also meant they didn’t have nearly as much waste to dispose of—though waste disposal remained a serious and unpleasant issue.36
What all this meant was explosive growth for the Union Stock Yards, which grew to almost unimaginable dimensions. By 1900, the yards covered 475 acres and had 130 miles of train tracks along their perimeter.37 They processed 82 percent of all meat eaten in the United States.38 The 2,300 pens the yards had when they opened had expanded to 13,000 by 1950. Record receipts for a single day were 49,128 head of cattle, 122,749 hogs, and 71,792 sheep.39 Proud Chicagoans considered the Stock Yards and adjacent Packingtown to be “the eighth wonder of the world,” and millions of people paid to tour the packinghouses and yards.40
At their largest, the yards employed 25,000 people. The yards witnessed a kaleidoscope of cultures, as the original Irish and German workers gave way to Eastern Europeans and then African Americans and Mexicans. The jobs were often unpleasant, but they were numerous, and people needed work. There were thousands of jobs for women, as well, mostly doing the packaging of the finished products.41
Not too surprisingly, the success of the Union Stock Yards also created a boom for corn growers. All those animals needed tens of thousands of bushels of corn every day. Because of the huge demand, and because land was becoming increasingly costly as more people moved to the region, more and more farmers began to convert their grazing land to cornfields, so that they could sell corn to the feedlots and stockyards. It was the only way they could afford to keep their land.42
While diesel trucks and the expanding highway system initially served the Union Stock Yards, they would eventually do to the railroads what the railroads had done to river transport. Work was no longer tethered to place—including Chicago. The big meatpacking companies built locations in Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; East Saint Louis, Illinois; St. Joseph, Michigan. And, of course, Green Bay, Wisconsin—hence the Packers. In the 1930s, the Chicago Union Stock Yards, which had for decades never processed fewer than 13 million animals a year, began to decline.43 By the 1960s, the packing companies had shut down their Packingtown facilities, and in 1971 the Chicago Union Stock Yards finally closed.44
That was not the end of changes. Other giants arose, merging with, buying, or replacing the giants who had created Chicago’s Packingtown, with the new companies usually more diversified than just packing meat and not always owned in the United States. Fortunately, smaller, more specialized operations remain numerous, especially for pork processing, but it is the giants that fill the meat counters of major supermarket chains. Hogs remain important to the Corn Belt (most hogs are raised in the states that grow the most corn, with Iowa the leader for both). Beef moved farther west. Vacuum packing of meat made proximity to markets even more irrelevant. However, despite all the other changes, the concepts of feedlots and fattening cattle and hogs on corn have remained constants.45
The stockyards—all of them, not just the colossus in Chicago—connected the farm with industry. However, they separated consumers even further from any sense of where their food came from. Even those who never saw more than the carcass in the butcher shop still had some sense of meat coming from an animal, rather than from a factory. However, though a sense of nature as providing food, rather than corporations, was lost, huge economies of scale were achieved, and meat became abundantly available even to relatively poor families.
Though the Chicago Union Stock Yards closed, economies of scale are still with us, and corn is still the primary food on which livestock is fattened. At one time, “corn-fed beef” was an advertising campaign. Today, “it’s what’s for dinner” in most of the nation—though it is also sometimes a bone of contention for those who wonder if corn is the best option for feeding cattle.
Dr. Dell Allen has a long association with beef and cattle feed. A meat scientist who specializes in food safety, regulatory implementation, beef grading, and raising beef, he was a professor of animal science at Kansas State University for more than twenty years, worked for the USDA and Chicago Mercantile Exchange to help improve compliance in beef grading, was invited multiple times to Brazil to help with their cattle industry, and today works as an independent consultant to the beef-packing industry on beef-cattle issues. Allen explains why corn makes good sense both economically and ecologically, especially today.
Cattle always start out on grass, but we finish them on feed, with most of that being corn. With this grass-corn combination, we can bring a steer to a market weight of 1,200 to 1,300 pounds in 18 to 20 months. If we still relied on raising cattle on grass, that same animal would require four to five years to reach market weight—and that market weight would be 200 to 300 pounds lighter than what is achieved by grain feeding. Today, in parts of the country with adequate rainfall, six to eight acres of grassland are required for every cow-calf unit. (A cow-calf unit is one cow that raises one calf per year.) In parts of the more arid southwestern U.S., a cow-calf unit requires up to 100 acres, because with less rainfall, there’s less grass. To graze one steer over the summer in good grass country, you typically need four acres of grassland. To produce the same amount of beef as we do now but feeding cattle grass only, we’d need to at least double the amount of land currently used—that would be the equivalent of several additional states—plus we’d need vastly more water and we’d need to double the number of cattle—that would mean approximately 200 million head—because of the extra time required when raising them on grass. Essentially the same issues apply to dairy cattle. Thanks to improved breeding, nutrition, and animal care, we have been able to get more milk from fewer cows. Since the 1940s, we’ve reduced dairy’s ‘carbon footprint’ by 63 percent. So the impact on the environment would be huge if we abandoned corn as feed. Plus, everything would be vastly more expensive.
So corn-fed beef has a smaller carbon footprint and is less expensive. Most folks also think it tastes better. At a three-day symposium on beef hosted by the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance, planners had arranged for a little test. Everyone was given two identical cuts of beef, one grass-fed and one corn-fed. Both were cooked identically. Despite the fact that sympathies had been running high for grass-fed beef, almost everyone in the room agreed that the corn-fed beef tasted better and was more tender.
But the environment and flavor aren’t the only considerations. There is research that indicates that grass-fed beef has nutritional advantages over corn-fed (micronutrients and fat composition differ; protein, iron, and B vitamins are the same), but grass-fed beef (and grass-fed milk, as well) costs more than corn-fed, sometimes a lot more, depending on regions or markets.
Some people debate whether the stomachs of cattle are really suited to digesting grain. Obviously, they can digest it, and it is understood that grass is not enough to fatten them as well as corn, but the question persists: is corn really good for cattle? Much research has gone into trying to settle this issue, and an Internet search turns up thousands of scholarly articles about ongoing research into grain versus grass, grain versus silage, silage plus grain versus either alone, early silage versus late silage, and silage versus grass, with many discoveries but no conclusive evidence that corn is a problem—or rather is no more of a problem than other options. Also, there is the issue of what cattle would eat during the winter, if silage and grain were not used. It is worth noting, too, that grass feeding can cause problems, both because “grass” includes a wide range of forage plants, not all beneficial and some toxic, and because, as with corn, really lush green grass can sicken animals if they get too much. Plus, grazing pastures can vanish during a drought, leaving cattle with nothing to eat unless silage and other fodder have been stored.46 So, there are no obvious or simple answers.
The claim that midwesterners like corn-fed beef better because they’re accustomed to the taste is certainly valid. They’ve been eating corn-fed beef in the Midwest for almost two hundred years, so very few people in this region have ever tasted beef that was not fed corn. That said, the fact that corn-fed beef has been eaten for so long seems to suggest that, if not ideal, it is at least not dangerous. In addition, corn feeding offers the consistent flavor that the marketplace demands. Corn-fed beef is what most people think beef should taste like.
All that said, it is wonderful and vitally important that grass-fed beef is available for those who can afford it and who are concerned about the possibility of lower nutritive value in corn-fed beef. Greater diversity in both types of cattle and types of feed makes the food supply less vulnerable and expands the potential for learning. However, for the majority of Americans, price will of necessity win over most other considerations. Tenderness and familiar flavor are also important to consumers. So, as is so often the case in issues with widespread impact and so many facets, there are no easy answers, and there is no action that solves all problems.
(It is worth noting that the discussion about grass-fed beef versus corn-fed beef is not the same as a discussion about conventional versus organic beef. Organic beef or organic milk comes primarily from cows being fed organic corn. Grass-fed beef will probably also be organic, but beef or milk that is organic is not necessarily grass-fed.)
It is not just the United States that doesn’t have enough land for grass feeding; it is a problem for the whole world. Some countries (such as Japan) would not be able to raise beef at all if they had to grass-feed cattle, but even countries with more land and traditions of grass feeding are running out of space. Dr. Allen says of his time as a consultant in Brazil, “Brazil had slightly more cattle than the U.S. did at that time—120 million head, versus our 90 million head. However, because they raised them on grass instead of feeding them grain, their harvest rate on their total cattle herd was less than half ours. As land gets more costly and, because of growing populations, less available, you simply can’t afford to keep cattle around for the extra years—and extra acres—required for grass feeding.”
Brazil has now begun to switch to grain feeding. Allen continues, “Even if we had enough land, we still couldn’t do it. I grew up in the ‘good old days,’ where we had no electricity but a farmer grew his own food and could feed himself and his family. But we can’t go back to that model. We can’t go back to a world with no electricity and most Americans living on farms. There are too many people to feed now, and the only way we can do it is by using modern agricultural practices and adopting new technologies.”
And corn is how those people are fed, either directly or indirectly. “Without corn, we’d be in a protein-deficient situation,” Allen states. Creating protein is the goal. DeKryger echoes this objective. “We can feed all the people in Lake and Porter Counties of Indiana—that’s well over half a million people—3 quarter-pound servings of protein per week, every week, year round, from one of our farms. And we do it with a carbon footprint that is much lower than if large numbers of people had their own pigs.”
None of this is to say that the increased interest in heirloom breeds of pigs, grass-fed beef and lamb, small farms, and organic-farming methods are not worth supporting. They most definitely are. It is important to maintain diversity and pursue alternative agricultural paradigms. These things enrich lives and afford opportunities for those who wish to pursue different approaches to farming, but they also expand the horizon and offer a laboratory of sorts to test ideas and methodologies on a smaller scale. However, they are also luxuries few can afford, and, more importantly, grass feeding in particular is not sustainable. Organic and grass-fed options are certainly both aesthetically and nutritionally desirable, but they are more labor-intensive for the producer, costlier for the consumer, have a much larger carbon footprint, and are not really capable of feeding large populations—especially when such a small percentage of the population wants to farm.
Allen observes, “A friend of mine attended a meeting in India, where he presented a paper on issues facing the U.S. consumer. After his presentation, a person in attendance at the meeting noted that the issues being debated by U.S. consumers are problems that reflect a society that has never been hungry.” Food quality will always be worth pursuing and protecting, but one must also keep in mind the realities of the world today—and in the future.
Of course, meat isn’t the only thing cattle provide. The connection between corn and dairy is underscored by the quarter issued for the state most identified with dairy products: Wisconsin. The back of the quarter bears the image of an ear of corn, a cow, and a wheel of cheese.
The dairy industry is actually slightly older than the beef industry, though it never took on the gritty but legendary image of either cattle drives or Chicago’s Union Stock Yards. It’s more wholesome than that. Originally, dairy farming consisted of the handful of cows farmers brought with them to provide milk and butter for their families, and a farmer sitting on a stool milking one of those cows is probably the image most people conjure when thinking of dairy farms. In fact, it was dairy cows that farmers were letting into their fenced fields in the old days, to clean up the corn plants after harvesting.
As towns grew and jobs became more specialized, dairy farming became its own pursuit. And this wasn’t limited to Wisconsin. Dairy farming grew up pretty much everywhere corn was being grown, because in order to produce a lot of milk, cows need to consume a lot of calories—something corn is good at providing. As a result, there are wonderful dairies, small and large, throughout the Midwest.
That said, Wisconsin was one of the earliest states to focus on dairy farming, and while butter, cream, and fluid milk would be produced, cheese became the state’s greatest legacy. Wisconsin’s soil was, on the whole, better for growing feed crops than cash crops, which suited dairy farming. In the 1840s and 1850s, dairy farmers from New York moved to Wisconsin, and their considerable experience led to the rise of commercial dairying. They made butter, but because refrigeration was not available at this point, they focused on one of the world’s oldest ways of preserving milk: cheese making. By the 1870s, the industry had grown enough that professional organizations were being formed, and a decade later, the University of Wisconsin began teaching courses on dairying. The next big step forward was the arrival of German, Swiss, and Scandinavian immigrants, who took readily to dairy farming and introduced European-style cheeses.47 In 1877, Swiss-born John Jossi created one of the few truly American cheeses: brick.48 Wisconsin was the country’s top dairy state by 1915. Still is.
The Nebraska dairy trade focused more on cream and butter. Jack Chaffin, longtime docent at the Nebraska History Museum in Lincoln, pointed out the museum’s cream separators, stating, “For years, Nebraska was big into cream.” Local creameries would buy cream from farmers and then turn the cream into butter and, later, ice cream. Chaffin pointed out the signs for two creameries in particular: Fairmont Creamery, from Fairmont, Nebraska, founded in 1884,49 and Beatrice Creamery Company, founded in 1894 in Beatrice, Nebraska.50 In time, both of these creameries would grow, diversify, and move: Beatrice Creamery to Chicago, where it evolved into the international giant Beatrice Foods; Fairmont Creamery to Omaha, Nebraska, as the Fairmont Foods Company. A hundred years later, Fairmont Foods closed and Beatrice essentially returned home, when the company was sold to Omaha-based ConAgra. However, both companies demonstrated that dairy was definitely able to kick-start big businesses.
Fair Oaks Farms in Fair Oaks, Indiana, is an example of a huge, modern dairy operation that takes the health of the cattle, the environment, and consumers seriously. A relatively young two generations old, this cutting-edge dairy produces enough milk for 8 million people. It’s one of the largest dairy farms in the country, sprawling across more than thirty thousand acres. According to Fair Oaks CEO Gary Corbett, “As of March 1, 2013, we will be milking 36,000 cows a day.”
The daily meal plan for each cow includes around forty pounds of grain, fifty pounds of silage, and more than thirty gallons of water. To accommodate this dramatic menu, the nine families that own Fair Oaks Farms grow their own corn and alfalfa for cow feed.51 Ninety pounds of grain and silage a day for thirty-six thousand cows means they grow a lot of corn. Corbett notes, “Corn is great for the feeding of dairy cattle. A cow’s four stomachs are designed to utilize the nutrition in high-fiber foods.”
The dairy’s efforts to minimize the environmental impact of the operation include such innovations as collecting all the manure the cows produce, processing it into methane gas, and using the gas to power the generators for running the entire operation. So there is no landfill and no demand for power from local electric companies.
In addition to producing fluid milk, Fair Oaks Farms makes butter, cheese, and ice cream right on the property. In a world where people have become distanced from the sources of their food, Fair Oaks is also working to close that gap, with fun, interactive educational facilities that explain dairy farming to the public. Visitors who wish to do so may view not only milking, but also calves being born. Corbett states, “An important goal of Fair Oaks Farms is to help reconnect the public with farming and show that agriculture and animal welfare are compatible.” As cities continue to get larger and sprawl farther out into what was once farmland, operations like this provide something of a template for where dairy farming is likely headed in the twenty-first century.52 Fair Oaks also offers a paradigm for farms of every size: to be sustainable, farms need to find ways to take care of the animals and the environment.
On the opposite end of the size continuum is Sylvia Zimmerman of Fulton Creek Jersey Cheese in Ohio. An intelligent, outgoing woman whose energy belies approaching retirement age, Sylvia is a farmer and the wife of a farmer. Her husband, Ed Zimmerman Jr., and Ed’s son, Ed III, raise the corn, and while most of it is sent to market, Sylvia lays claim to some of it to feed a little herd of beautiful pale brown Jersey dairy cows and her fabulously eclectic collection of chickens (winter silage for the cows, who are pasture-fed all summer, and grain for the chickens). The dairy operation actually represents one of those wonderfully helpful intergenerational arrangements that seem fairly common in farm country. Neighbor John is a young man with a young family. He wants to farm but can’t really afford the land or the equipment. So Sylvia sold him her forty-five Jersey cows, and he uses her land and her milking equipment. He sends much of the milk to supply local grocery stores and the nearby Dannon Yogurt plant, but Sylvia keeps 250 pounds of milk per week on hand to make the beautiful cheeses she sells at the local farmers’ market, along with the brown and blue eggs produced by her free-range chickens. Once the cows and chickens are inspected, ripening cheeses have been turned, and email has been checked, Sylvia, who has a master’s degree and speaks three languages, settles down with a book titled The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Civilization. As with most farmers, it seems, farming is not just a job—it is a passion.
Later in the day, Sylvia walks down to one of the fields currently in the process of being harvested. She passes her husband at the grain bins, where he is working with the grain drier. Ahead of her, Ed III negotiates an ocean of grain in his big red International Harvester combine. As she picks her way through the broken shafts left behind by the combine, she is surrounded by the gold of both crushed stalks and still-standing corn. Sylvia is pleased to see that the combine has left behind some cobs with kernels. “My chickens will love these,” she says, scooping up several cobs. The chickens confirm Sylvia’s prediction, pouncing with surprising enthusiasm on the kernels she sprinkles on the ground. Clearly, corn is popular with her hens.
While chickens didn’t have the stunning economic impact of cattle and hogs, they were, and are, a substantial part of the agricultural picture in the Midwest. In the early days of the frontier through to the early 1900s, many people kept chickens—certainly, most farms had a few. They were rarely eaten but existed primarily to supply eggs.53 Geese and turkeys were also fed corn, and they loved it as passionately as chickens did.54 (Ducks are generally fed corn today, but there were so many wild ducks in the country’s early history, almost no one raised ducks until after 1873, when a Yankee clipper ship pulled into Long Island carrying nine White Pekin ducks taken aboard in China. It is from these nine that all the millions of Pekin ducks in the United States today are descended.55 So domestically raised ducks are part of the current story but not a big part of the early history.)
Urban chicken consultant Jennifer Murtoff relates that paralleling the interest in local foods and raising one’s own veggies is an increased interest in raising chickens, even in urban settings. It seems one more indicator of increasing awareness that something has been lost in being disconnected from the source of our foods. As an urban chicken consultant, Murtoff helps people raise healthy, happy layers, and that involves corn. She says there are two primary reasons for feeding corn to chickens: first, as for other livestock, is that it saves money. Second, corn contains xanthophylls (yellow carotenoid pigments), “and xanthophylls in their diet make the yolks in their eggs a lovely golden yellow.”
Chickens are not naturally vegetarians; they’re omnivores, so corn is not enough. They need a source of protein. For most chickens, that means a protein supplement, often in the form of protein pellets. For free-range chickens, however, it can also mean bugs, worms, lizards, mice, and anything else they can catch. Also, Murtoff explains, if chickens are fed whole corn, they need to be fed grit, such as crushed oyster shells (which provide both grit and additional calcium for strong eggshells). The grit helps the chickens grind whole corn, plus whatever straw or feathers they might accidentally swallow, in their gizzards. Sylvia’s chickens are free-range, so she doesn’t have to worry about them getting the grit they need to break down the corn, as they’ll swallow small bits of gravel whenever they feel their gizzards need help.
Chickens are prodigiously equipped for egg laying. Each hen is born with somewhere between two thousand and five thousand eggs at the ready. Hens start laying eggs at twenty-one weeks of age and, if nutrition is adequate, produce an egg every twenty-five hours. Depending on the breed, a laying hen (which can live anywhere from five to eleven years) will lay about three hundred eggs a year.
Even though many farms kept a few chickens, on the whole, prior to the 1920s, chickens were not a popular form of livestock. Chickens simply didn’t do well in the winter. Even when kept from freezing, they declined in vigor without adequate sunlight. As a result, in cities, eggs were considered a luxury, but even on farms they were far from abundant, especially in northern climes. Then, in 1922, vitamin D was discovered, and it was also discovered that supplementing chickens with vitamin D would get them through the winter. Flocks began to get larger, and eggs began to get cheaper. Demand increased, production increased, prices kept dropping, and growers responded by producing more. By the 1950s, some big producers had flocks of twenty-five thousand chickens or more (which created new issues, as well as more eggs). By this time, most folks had stopped raising their own chickens, because cities were growing and didn’t readily accommodate back-yard poultry and, to an even greater degree, because low egg prices made it not worth the effort and expense to raise one’s own.56
The mid- to late 1800s had seen a flurry of breeding activity, as people tried to develop the perfect chicken for every purpose, from showiest feathers to tastiest meat to most reliable layers. Then, the 1920s saw the rise of commercial hatcheries, where chickens could be raised in large numbers. This decade also witnessed the development of the broiler, the first chicken actually raised for its meat.57 With so many chickens being born, chicken meat, too, was no longer a luxury, and “a chicken in every pot” looked like a reasonable campaign promise in 1928. So an abundance of broilers and fryers, as well as of cheap eggs, are developments that are less than a century old.
During that 1800s breeding frenzy, the best known of the commercial chickens became available, with the White Leghorn leading the pack in the area of egg laying. Not only were they reliable layers, but their eggs had pristine white shells.58 However, another reason the Leghorn became the most popular bird for commercial egg operations is that a Leghorn hen needs to consume only five pounds of food to produce a dozen eggs, while many other layers need to eat ten pounds of food to produce a dozen.59 The Rhode Island Red took top honors for meat production. However, many varieties of chickens are still raised, both for the health of the species as a whole and for the interesting variety offered in size, flavor, and, for layers, egg color and taste.
Corn is a big part of feeding chickens—it’s normally at least 50 percent of what they are fed. And given the multitude of chickens in the United States (an estimated 2 billion),60 and the amount of feed needed to keep them producing (as noted, five to ten pounds of feed for a dozen eggs, and about two pounds of feed for a pound of meat), that is, once again, a stunning amount of corn. (And then there are turkeys, ducks, and geese.)
In addition to corn, chickens are generally offered commercial pellets that contain the needed protein, vitamins, and minerals, but still, it is corn that gives them the energy to keep growing (and, if Sylvia Zimmerman’s chickens are any indication, keeps them happy).
Even if humans stopped eating corn tomorrow, it would hardly make a ripple in the world of corn farming, with 2 billion chickens, 90 million head of cattle, and 65 million hogs to feed. And then there are all the other things done with corn. Good thing the Midwest grows so much of it.