Cogs in the great machine

Y OU CAN SMELL Greeley, Colorado, long before you can see it. The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during the summer months, blanketing Greeley day and night like an invisible fog. Many people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for New Yorkers. Others can’t stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with their sleep. Greeley is a modern‑day factory town where cattle are the main units of production, where workers and machines turn large steer into small, vacuum‑sealed packages of meat. The billions of fast food hamburgers that Americans now eat every year come from places like Greeley. The industrialization of cattle‑raising and meatpacking over the past two decades has completely altered how beef is produced – and the towns that produce it. Responding to the demands of the fast food and supermarket chains, the meatpacking giants have cut costs by cutting wages. They have turned one of the nation’s best‑paying manufacturing jobs into one of the lowest‑paying, created a migrant industrial workforce of poor immigrants, tolerated high injury rates, and spawned rural ghettos in the American heartland. Crime, poverty, drug abuse, and homelessness have lately taken root in towns where you’d least expect to find them. The effects of this new meatpacking regime have become as inescapable as the odors that drift from its feedlots, rendering plants, and pools of slaughterhouse waste.

The ConAgra Beef Company runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex just a few miles north of downtown Greeley. Weld County, which includes Greeley, earns more money every year from livestock products than any other county in the United States. ConAgra is the largest private employer in Weld County, running a beef slaughterhouse and a sheep slaughterhouse, as well as rendering and processing facilities.

To supply the beef slaughterhouse, ConAgra operates a pair of enormous feedlots. Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand head of cattle. At times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white fur that goes on for acres. These cattle don’t eat blue grama and buffalo grass off the prairie. During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. A typical steer will consume more than three thousand pounds of grain during its stay at a feedlot, just to gain four hundred pounds in weight. The process involves a fair amount of waste. Each steer deposits about fifty pounds of urine and manure every day. Unlike human waste, the manure is not sent to a treatment plant. It is dumped into pits, huge pools of excrement that the industry calls “lagoons.” The amount of waste left by the cattle that pass through Weld County is staggering. The two Monfort feedlots outside Greeley produce more excrement than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis – combined.

Before Greeley became a meatpacking town, it was a utopian community of small farmers. It was founded in 1870 by Nathan Meeker, a newspaper editor from New York City who wanted to create a city in the American West dedicated to agriculture, education, mutual aid, and high moral values. Meeker named the idealistic new settlement after his boss at the New York Tribune , Horace Greeley, who had given some career advice that proved legendary: “Go west, young man.” The town of Greeley, Colorado, eventually thrived, becoming a major producer of beans and sugar beets. But Nathan Meeker did not live long enough to enjoy its success. In 1879, Meeker got into a dispute with a group of Ute Indians, who killed him and then scalped him.

For many years the farmers of Greeley held themselves apart from local ranchers, at one point building a wooden fence around the town to keep cattle out – a fence fifty miles long. During the Depression, when commodity prices hit rock bottom, a Greeley schoolteacher named Warren Monfort started to buy grain from local farmers and feed it to his cattle. At the time, American cattle were mainly grass‑fed, not grain‑fed. They roamed the range, eating native grasses, or they lived on farms and ate hay. Monfort soon became one of the nation’s first large‑scale cattle feeders, buying cheap corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa from his neighbors. His feedlot business greatly expanded after World War II. By feeding cattle year‑round, Monfort could control the timing of his livestock sales and wait for the best prices at the Chicago stockyards. The meat of grain‑fed beef was fatty and tender; unlike grass‑fed beef, it did not need to be aged for a few weeks; it could be eaten within days of the slaughter. Feedlots began to open throughout the rural Midwest. American grain surpluses, largely fueled by government price supports, provided inexpensive food for livestock and made cattle‑feeding a standard practice in the beef industry. Warren Monfort started his business in the 1930s with eighteen head of cattle. By the late 1950s he was feeding about twenty thousand.

In 1960 Monfort and his son Kenneth opened a small slaughterhouse in Greeley near his feedlots. They signed a generous union contract with the Amalgamated Butcher Workmen, granting benefits like seniority rights and pay bonuses for work on the late shift. Jobs at the Monfort slaughterhouse were among the highest paying in Greeley, and there was a long waiting list of people seeking work at the plant. Greeley became a company town, dominated by the Monfort family and ruled with a compassionate paternalism. Ken Monfort was a familiar presence at the slaughterhouse. Workers felt comfortable approaching him with suggestions and complaints. He had an unusual background for a meatpacking executive. He was a liberal Democrat who had served two terms in the state legislature. He was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war, one of the two people from Colorado to earn a place on President Nixon’s “enemies list.” Appearing on that list, in Monfort’s view, was a great honor. After a union vote at the Greeley slaughterhouse in 1970, Ken Monfort sent the newly elected steward a warm personal letter. “If I can ever be of help to you,” he wrote, “my door is open.” The prosperity and labor peace in Greeley, however, were soon threatened by fundamental changes sweeping through the meatpacking industry – an upheaval that came to be known as “the IBP revolution.”