Steak - Mark Schatzker [102]
Why would a country that loves steak more than any other nation give up grass-fed steak—which appears to be healthier—for feedlot beef? Why would Argentines, who had grass and cattle stretching to every horizon, decide it would be better to start laying down tons of fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, harvest corn, then crowd cattle into a pen and feed it to them?
I presented these questions to the man who runs the largest feedlot in Argentina. Miguel de Achaval comes by his expertise the old-fashioned way: he spent twelve years working in Texas for a feedlot company called Cactus Feeders, which is so huge it makes Bill O’Brien’s two-feedlot operation seem rinky-dink. At any one time, Cactus Feeders can have as many as half a million cattle eating corn out of miles of concrete troughs.
De Achaval runs a 27,000-head feedlot four hundred kilometers north of Santa Rosa next to a town called Villa Mercedes, but he would like to open five or six more, including one with a 50,000-head capacity. He is still working for his old boss, Cactus Feeders, but he also works for Cresud, an Argentine conglomerate that owns shopping malls and office buildings, and Tyson Foods, the agri-behemoth that in all probability wholesaled the dry and flavorless rib eye I ate at the Big Texan. The three companies joined forces a few years ago here in Argentina and formed a company called Carnes Pampeanas.
De Achaval works at the organization’s slaughterhouse and packing plant near Santa Rosa, where he sits behind an imposing desk in the largest office in the building, a sprawling map of Argentina on the wall behind him. As de Achaval sees things, Argentina is finally catching up to the rest of the world. Its agro-industrial awakening took place in the early 1990s, he told me, when the big multinationals arrived, and companies like Dow and Cargill began buying grain from farmers. They offered favorable terms—checks that paid in ten days, underwritten by companies that were in no danger of going bankrupt. Argentine meat-packers, on the other hand, took a long time to pay, if they paid at all. The price of grain on world markets, furthermore, was going up, and genetically modified varieties of corn meant farmers could reap bigger harvests than they thought possible. The multinational grain buyers even offered to help cattle ranchers with upfront costs, like fertilizer and pesticide, to help ease the switchover from cattle to grain. It didn’t take long for Argentine ranchers to see where the profits were, and it didn’t take long before all that grain they were growing began to be fed to cattle. “The world feeds cattle on grain,” de Achaval said. “No one feeds cattle on grass.”
The government, too, was playing its part. A few days before our meeting, de Achaval had met with a member of the governing party (known as Peronists after Argentina’s longtime leader Juan Perón), who told him, “Every time a Peronist was in power and the citizens were not able to buy beef, the Peronists lost the election.” In Argentina, steak is politics.
It was looking more and more as if Argentina’s grass-fed steak days were behind it. The best beef land was churning out freighter loads of corn and soybeans. Cattle were grazing second-rate pasture, and the taste of their beef was, at best, inconsistent. Corn-fed beef, on the other hand, always tasted the same. Already, according to de Achaval, something like half the beef the country produced was out of a feedlot. In ten years, he said, it would be more like 80 percent, and in twenty years, 100 percent, by which point the flavor of Argentine steak would be indistinguishable from that of West Texas steak.
One aspect of de Achaval’s account, however, didn’t add up: If crops paid so well that all the best beef-fattening pastures were now grown over with cornstalks and soybean plants, how could it make financial sense to feed that corn to animals designed to eat grass? When it comes to