Word: feedlots
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...weeks ago to $44.57 last week, and hogs in the last month have gone from $25 to $38.57 -still below their peaks last August. In response to farm-belt complaints that prices previously had dropped so low as to threaten bankruptcies among some animal raisers and feedlot operators, the Government is buying up $100 million of "excess" beef and pork for use in its school-lunch program, and has asked Australia and New Zealand to "voluntarily" restrain meat exports...
Normally, there would be ample opportunity for all the people involved in the long food-production and marketing process to reap a reasonable profit. In the normal chain of events for beef, for example, the farmer sells his calf to a feedlot operator, who is one of the middlemen. He in turn fattens the animal and often sells it to a meatpacker for a few cents less per pound than he bought it. The feedlot operator hopes to profit by adding considerable weight to the animal in a relatively short time, but his problem lately has been that feed costs...
Chasing Animals. The so-called middlemen undoubtedly have pocketed their share too, and there are a lot of middlemen. In the case of beef, animals are sold by the rancher to a feedlot operator, who fattens stock for several months before selling it to a slaughterhouse. The carcasses are then sold to companies called breakers, which divide the meat into standard cuts and market it to stores...
...seven to nine months the heifer or bull (castrated into a steer to hasten fattening) is sold to the feedlot operators or to farmers who also specialize in fattening cattle for market. In Warren Montfort's barn in Greeley, Colo., a huge, self-unloading truck moves unceasingly up and down the quarter-mile-long pens, pushing Montfort's special feed mixture into the troughs while a solid line of white faces eat their heads off. Says Montfort: "This is a factory. We manufacture beef and nothing else...