The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [38]
The animals are rounded up and herded into a “backgrounding” pen, where they’ll spend a couple of months before boarding the truck for Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: The animals are, for the first time in their lives, confined to a pen, “bunk broken”—taught to eat from a trough—and gradually accustomed to eating what is for them a new and unnatural diet. Here is where the rumen first encounters corn.
It was in the backgrounding pen that I first made the acquaintance of 534. Before coming to Vale I’d told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their steers through the life cycle; Ed Blair, the older of the brothers, suggested only half in jest that I might as well go whole hog and buy the animal, if I really wanted to appreciate the challenges of ranching. This immediately struck me as a promising idea.
Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad straight back and thick shoulders—basically, a sturdy frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a memorable face in this black Angus sea, one that I could pick out of the crowd at the feedlot. Almost as soon as I began surveying the ninety or so animals in the pen, 534 moseyed up to the railing and made eye contact. He had a wide stout frame and was brockle-faced—he had three easy-to-spot white blazes. Here was my boy.
3. INDUSTRIAL: GARDEN CITY, KANSAS
Traveling from the ranch to the feedyard, as 534 and I both did (in separate vehicles) the first week of January, feels a lot like going from the country to the big city. A feedlot is very much a premodern city, however, teeming and filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads, and choking air rendered visible by dust.
The urbanization of the world’s livestock being a fairly recent historical development, it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities centuries ago, in the days before modern sanitation. As in fourteenth-century London, say, the workings of the metropolitan digestion remain vividly on display, the foodstuffs coming in, the streams of waste going out. The crowding into tight quarters of recent arrivals from all over, together with the lack of sanitation, has always been a recipe for disease. The only reason contemporary animal cities aren’t as plague-ridden or pestilential as their medieval human counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.
I spent the better part of a day at Poky Feeders, walking the streets, cattle watching, looking up my steer, and touring local landmarks like the towering feed mill. In any city it’s easy to lose track of nature—of the transactions between various species and the land on which everything ultimately depends. Back on the ranch the underlying ecological relationship could not have been more legible: It is a local food chain built upon grass and the ruminants that can digest grass, and it draws its energy from the sun. But what about here?
As the long shadow of the mill suggests, the feedlot is a city built upon America’s mountain of surplus corn—or rather, corn plus the various pharmaceuticals a ruminant must have if it is to tolerate corn. Yet, having started out from George Naylor’s farm, I understood that the corn on which this place runs is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships powered by a very different source of energy—the fossil fuel it takes to grow all that corn. So if the modern CAFO is a city built upon commodity corn, it is a city afloat on an invisible sea of petroleum. How this peculiar state of affairs came to seem sensible is a question I spent my day at Poky trying to answer.
IT WAS ONLY NATURAL that I start my tour at the feed mill, the feedlot’s thundering hub, where three meals a day for thirty-seven thousand animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed pass through the mill each day. Every hour of every day a tractor trailer pulls up to the loading dock to deliver another fifty tons of corn. The driver opens