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By Root 603 0

the cow maintains and expands their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold and hogging the sunlight; the animal also spreads grass seed, plants it with his hooves, and then fertilizes it with his manure. In exchange for these services the grasses offer ruminants a plentiful and exclusive supply of lunch. For cows (like sheep, bison, and other ruminants) have evolved the special ability to convert grass—which single-stomached creatures like us can’t digest—into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess what is surely the most highly evolved digestive organ in nature: the rumen. About the size of a medicine ball, the organ is essentially a twenty-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria dines on grass. Living their unseen lives at the far end of the food chain that culminates in a hamburger, these bacteria have, like the grasses, coevolved with the cow, whom they feed.

Truly this is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the bacteria, for the animals, and for us, the animals’ eaters. While it is true that overgrazing can do ecological harm to a grassland, in recent years ranchers have adopted rotational grazing patterns that more closely mimic the patterns of the bison, a ruminant that sustainably grazed these same grasses for thousands of years before the cow displaced it. In fact, a growing number of ecologists now believe the rangelands are healthier with cattle on them, provided they’re moved frequently. Today the most serious environmental harm associated with the cattle industry takes place on the feedlot.

In fact, growing meat on grass makes superb ecological sense: It is a sustainable, solar-powered food chain that produces food by transforming sunlight into protein. Row crops could accomplish this trick too, but not around here: In places like western South Dakota the land is far too arid, thin, and hilly to grow crops without large amounts of irrigation, chemicals, and erosion. “My cattle can take low-quality forage and convert it into a pretty desirable product,” Rich Blair pointed out. “If you didn’t have ruminant animals, all this”—he gestures to the high plains rolling out from his ranch in every direction—“would be the great American desert.”

So then why is it that steer number 534 hasn’t tasted a blade of prairie grass since October? Speed, in a word, or, in the industry’s preferred term, “efficiency.” Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth. “In my grandfather’s time, cows were four or five years old at slaughter,” Rich explained. “In the fifties, when my father was ranching, it was two or three years old. Now we get there at fourteen to sixteen months.” Fast food, indeed. What gets a steer from 80 to 1,100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial logic that will propel the animal on the rest of its swift journey to a wholesale box of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible—after all, it has succeeded in making beef everyday fare for millions of people for whom it once represented a luxury. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely you are to begin wondering if that rational logic might not also be completely mad.

IN OCTOBER, two weeks before I made his acquaintance, steer number 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are prone to getting sick. Calves are weaned for a couple of reasons: to free their mothers to have more calves (9534 had already been inseminated again in June), and to get