The Feedlot: How Concentrated Cattle Feeding Remade the Beef Business

What Is a Feedlot?

A feedlot is a set of pens where cattle are fed a measured ration, usually grain-based, to bring them to slaughter weight and finish. Calves are born and grown on ranches and pastures, then sold to feeders who concentrate them in yards for the last months of life. That split between the cow-calf operation and the feeder is one of the defining features of modern American beef.

The scale of the change is shown by one figure from the Living History Farm account of beef feedlots: in 1935 only about 5.1 percent of the nation's 42.8 million beef cattle were fattened in feedlots.

The Rise of Large Feedlots in the 1950s

Large feedlots emerged in the 1950s as producers consolidated to meet demand for grain-fed beef. Among the first was the Kern County Land Company near Bakersfield, California, led by former Safeway executive Dwight Cochran, which fed 35,000 to 50,000 head at one time.

On the Great Plains, Fred Lewter started the Lewter Feed Yard near Lubbock, Texas, in 1955. It was the first large feedlot there, with pens for up to 34,000 head. Lewter won a major buyer, the A&P grocery chain, after his carcasses won livestock judging contests.

How Large Yards Fed Cattle

Operators used cattle nutrition research to fatten animals to set specifications. Lewter's ration included milo, silage, mineral salt, calcium and phosphorus, along with the growth hormone DES, which was later banned as a carcinogen. Large feedlots employed nutritionists and full-time veterinarians and used computers to track how much feed produced how much weight gain.

Antibiotics such as penicillin let operators confine large numbers of animals without uncontrolled disease outbreaks. Without them, the density of a big yard would have been far riskier.

Why Grain Feeding Took Hold

Three forces pushed feeding onto grain. Consumers wanted marbled beef, which grain feeding produces. Grain was cheap in the 1950s. And antibiotics made dense confinement practical. By 1963, about 66 percent of steers and heifers slaughtered were grain-fed, and roughly 40 percent of those came from large western feedlot operations.

Grading followed the trend. USDA quality grades such as Prime, Choice and Select set minimum marbling, as shown in the USDA carcass beef standards. The Living History Farm account notes that grading expanded and favored grain-fed, marbled carcasses, with 50 percent of interstate beef graded in 1955 and 96 percent of interstate red meat by 1983.

Packers Followed the Cattle

Packinghouses moved to the feeding regions. Cudahy left the Chicago Stockyards in 1954 to locate near feedlots, where labor was cheaper and nonunion. Iowa Beef Packers, founded in 1960, cut carcasses into retail cuts at the plant, packed them in boxes and shipped them, removing bone and waste weight from shipments.

Refrigerated trucks and the Interstate Highway System made this model workable. The yard, the plant and the highway became parts of one machine, which is why feedlots are often discussed together with boxed beef.

What It Meant for Ranchers

Ranchers increasingly focused on breeding and sold yearling calves to feeders. Of about 70,000 ranches in 1945, roughly 10,000 went out of business by 1980. Large ranches such as the Matador Land and Cattle Company were liquidated, while the King Ranch survived largely through oil revenue.

That is a useful corrective to a simple success story. The same system that put consistent beef in stores also squeezed many family operations. Retail beef prices roughly doubled between 1945 and 1960 and tripled again by 1983, yet beef consumption peaked in the early 1970s.

Learn More

The marbling story continues in the Angus Journal account of Certified Angus Beef. For more on how cattle are raised before they reach the yard, visit the ranching section of farm.FM or read a farm.FM story about feeding cattle.