Prime? Choice? Moderately Abundantly Marbled???? Which beef would you rather eat: utility, cutter, or canner? Can you tell by looking at a steer what kind of meat it will yield? If you're a feedlot operator, you can.

In 1935, 5% of beef cattle were fed in feedlots. By 1968, nearly three-quarters of the beef eaten by Americans came through industrialized feedlots. Led by California food disruptors like Dwight Cochran, feedlot operators in the 1940s and 1950s realized that they needed to control the feed inputs to their cattle in order to control the quality of the meat they produced. Too, they saw viable grazing lands shrinking.

Overgrazing had undeniably impacted the grasslands so that more and more land was needed to feed each steer. (Check out EP 021.) While the capacity of the range lands to support a steer declined, so too did the actual number of acres available as range land, as urban development, federal bureaucracies, and conservationists all sought to limit ranchers' access to what once had been regarded as grazing "commons."

Meanwhile, American's craved evermore cheap beef. In certain decades and market sectors, they desired highly marbled "Prime" cuts. With the rise of the Hospitality, Restaurant, and Institutional market sectors in the 1950s and 60s, the demand shifted to less fatty "Choice" cuts. In order to deliver what the market demanded, feedlots brought in increasingly younger cattle, turned them into "finished" products fast, and brought in more on the heels of the previous herd.

Teeming herds could be corralled onto relatively little land. The diseases generated through crowding animal bodies could be controlled with the introduction of antibiotics in the 1950s. Precisely formulated feed yielded uniform beef products. Industrial-scale feed mixers and automated food-and-water-delivery systems reduced per-head labor needs.

Whoa, Nellie! The industrialization of the U.S. beef industry happened in direct response to market demand. As with most developments in our foodways, the aggregate, long-term consequences reared their ugly heads before we could put the brakes on a wholesale restructuring of our beef-delivery infrastructure.

Join us for this introductory look at the rise of feedlots in our food landscape. And get ready to ride a bucking bull of controversies centered on beef production.