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But what would happen if the grading system stopped rewarding fatty meat entirely? Would less fatty meat be produced? Would less grain be fed? Probably only marginally less. As long as grain is cheap in relation to the price of meat, it would still make economic sense for the producer to put the animal in the feedlot and feed it lots of grain. The irony is that, given our economic imperatives that produce cheap grain, most of the fat is an inevitable consequence of producing the cheapest possible meat. We got fatty meat not because we demanded fatty meat but because fatty meat was the cheapest to produce. If we had demanded the same amount of leaner meat, meat prices would have been higher over the last 30 years.22

The Livestock Explosion and the Illusion of Cheap Grain

If we are feeding millions of tons of grain to livestock, it must be because it makes economic sense. Indeed, it does “make sense” under the rules of our economy. But that fact might better be seen as the problem, rather than the explanation that should put our concerns to rest. We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles. Big cars “made sense” only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat “makes sense” only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.

But why is grain in America so cheap? If grain is cheap simply because there is so much of it and it will go to waste unless we feed it to livestock, doesn’t grain-fed meat represent a sound use of our resources? Here we need to back up to another, more basic question: why is there so much grain in the first place?

In our production system each farmer must compete against every other farmer; the only way a farmer can compete is to produce more. Therefore, every farmer is motivated to use any new technology—higher yielding seeds, fertilizers, or machines—which will grow more and require less labor. In the last 30 years crop production has virtually doubled as farmers have adopted hybrid seeds and applied ever more fertilizer and pesticides. Since the 1940s fertilizer use has increased fivefold, and corn yields have tripled.

But this production imperative is ultimately self-defeating. As soon as one farmer adopts the more productive technology, all other farmers must do the same or go out of business. This is because those using the more productive technology can afford to sell their grain at a lower price, making up in volume what they lose in profit per bushel. That means constant downward pressure on the price of grain.

Since World War II real grain prices have sometimes fluctuated wildly, but the indisputable trend has been downward. The price of corn peaked at $6.43 per bushel in 1947 and fell to about $2.00 in 1967. In the early 1970s prices swung wildly up, but then fell to a low of $1.12 in 1977, or about one-sixth the price 30 years earlier. (All prices are in 1967 dollars.)23

This production imperative doesn’t fully explain why production of feed doubled after 1950. In the 1950s the problem of agricultural surplus was seen as too much of certain crops, such as wheat, cotton, and tobacco; so government programs subsidized cutbacks of certain crops, but allowed farmers to expand their acreage in others, such as the feed crops barley, soybeans, and grain sorghum. In Texas, for example, sorghum production leaped sevenfold after cotton acreage was limited by law in the 1950s.24

But neglected in this explanation of the low price of grain are the hidden production costs which we and future generations are subsidizing: the fossil fuels and water consumed, the groundwater mined, the topsoil lost, the fertilizer resources depleted, and the water polluted.

Fossil Fuel Costs

Agricultural production uses the equivalent of about 10 percent of all of the fossil fuel imported into the United States.25

Besides the cost of the grain used to produce meat, we can also measure the cost of the fossil fuel energy used compared with the food value we receive. Each calorie of protein we get from feedlot-produced beef costs us 78 calories