Word: farr
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Moving from range to feed lot must be as disorienting for cattle as moving from the New Guinea rain forest to Manhattan would be for a Pygmy. The first stop at Dick Farr's 35,000-animal feed lot is a receiving area where, says Farr, "we can dip, brand, castrate and vaccinate them in 30 seconds." Then the animals get their first taste of eating feed-lot-style. The first meal is alfalfa hay, which smells something like familiar range grass, mixed with a little bit of high-protein feed. Their diet is made "hotter" by adding larger...
...food is delivered to the pens by trucks, which are routed by computer. When an empty truck pulls up to Farr's $1 million feed mill, the woman operator perched in a control center (so well sealed that the air smells of ozone instead of the all-pervasive manure) spots the truck's number and identifies the feeding pen it is delivering to. She inserts a punch card carrying dietary instructions for the animals in that pen into the computer, which automatically dispenses the proper proportions of food into the truck. The truck then drives slowly along...
...slightly blocky steer that will yield USDA Choice Grade Beef. The object is to remove as many variables from the beef-raising process as possible and replace them with more stable techniques copied from the assembly line. "If we do things a little bit better than the others," says Farr, "when we lose money, we'll lose less. And when we make it, we'll make a little more." Henry Ford would have felt at home in Greeley...
...small-town doctor, had been a newspaper reporter, pressagent and screenwriter. Now he was introduced as a successful novelist devoting himself to "the last, simple but big task of putting it all down as well as I knew how." This book was, as Finis Farr notes, O'Hara's farewell to Malloy. As he does not note, the leave-taking was a mistake -not necessarily because O'Hara abandoned the character but because for the most part he had already ceased to see the world through Malloy's ironic, knowing and satiric eyes...
...known intimately in the course of his journalistic apprenticeship. Throughout his career, when he dealt with these worlds-or with Hollywood, where he also did time as a scriptwriter-his fiction rang not only with the good dialogue but rumbled with a ground base of moral disapproval as well. Farr notes that he never entirely succeeded in sloughing off the element of Catholic puritanism that had been bred in him as a child. Even as late as 1948, in A Rage to Live, O'Hara struck a rather stern tone. His subject-controversial at the time-was an upper...