Then news headlines have been full of stories about there being a crisis in the meat industry.
Indeed, I'll be curious how this shakes out. The crisis is frankly not really being deeply pondered, but my prediction is that it'll be used as an excuse by those who promote the deeply unnatural vegetarian and vegan diets as a reason to go unnatural. That shouldn't occur.
Rather, it should be a cry to go local.
So what's going on with meat?
Well, what is not going on is an increase in the price of beef on the hoof. No, what's happened is another example of what we discussed in
Part Two of this series, a disruption in the food supply chain.
Indeed, the food distribution system for meat sort of resembles a doubly frayed knot, and that's the problem. Beef or pigs come in from producers all over the country. When they're ready to ship, they're sold to the second tier of the system which usually feeds them out. From there they go, if you will, to the knot, or knots, which are the packers.
Now, a bit of disclosure, which also serves as an example.
My family has a close connection to the packing industry in a couple of ways. Today, we're a producer. We raise cattle. But in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, we were packers.
My grandfather left his home in Dyersville Iowa for the first time around 1914. He was 13.
Dyersville Iowa in 1912, when my grandfather would have been eleven years old and two years before he left school and first left Dyersville.
He left school because he was unhappy with the school itself. That's another story and this isn't the time for it, but that was the reason. He asked his parents if he could leave and go to work, and at that time and place, Dyersville Iowa of 1914 or 1915, they said yes. It wasn't as unusual as it sounds
He went to San Francisco. I don't know why, but he did. And when he got there, he took a job as an office boy for the Cunard Ship Line.
That seems really shocking, but the occupation of office boy, which we've touched on before, was as common white collar introductory job at the time. I dealt with it, sort of, here:
As noted in that thread, two of my ancestors held this job and for both of them it was the introductory job into the office. One of them, a maternal great grandfather, worked for the same company the rest of his life, rising to the position of CEO of it. Andrew Carnegie secured his entry into the work world basically the same way.
In my grandfather's case, I know little about his time in San Francisco. One thing that I think would surprise people, however, is that merely being on your own at an early age at the time didn't make you an indigent nor necessarily a candidate for a street gang. Young workers were pretty common and while most of them lived at home, not all of them did. For kids like my grandfather, the Church provided a strong cultural center and likely explains how they were able to live away from home. A good example of the central role of churches in the mid 20th Century can be found in another context in the film Brooklyn and while that film's plot strays to a degree from the likely course of its subjects, the strong central feature of the church, or more accurately Apostolic churches, for those who were members of them, is correct.
At some point, at least if a later obituary is correct, he returned to Dyersville.* I don't know how long he worked for Cunard, but it was long enough that they gave him a framed portrait of a ship when he left. So it must have been awhile. Anyhow, he apparently returned to his large family in Dyersville.
Cunard ship Saxonia. Cunard was a big ship line at the time.
In Dyersville, our family owned a store and some other business interests. The family had come to Dyersville from Westphalia in the 1850s and established a successful general store there. A successor store, a pharmacy, still existed the last time I checked. The general store, being a general store, dealt in all goods, including livestock.
Again, according to the obituary, he came back to Dyersville at some point. I should know more, but the people I'd really have to rely upon for those details, are largely gone now. Anyhow, he left again in 1924. So, some time after 1915 he came back and he worked, most likely at the store with his parents and siblings, in Dyersville. Of note, having been born in October 1901, even though he'd been working since at least 1915, he was still too young to enter the service in the fall of 1918 when the World War One ended. At that time, he'd just turned 17 years old.
In 1924, at age 23, he went to work in Denver Colorado for Cudahy Meat Packing.**
In 1925 he married Katheryn Hennessy, formerly of Leadville, Colorado, but who was now living in Denver with her family as part of a community or relocated Leadville residents. Leadville was already past its prime at the time. They likely met at church, indeed they almost certainly did, and the marriage had an interesting American pattern to it. He was of 100% German Westphalian extraction. She was of 100% Irish extraction. They were both, however, Roman Catholics. They were also unusually the exact same age, 24.
Victor Colorado in 1900, the year before my grandmother was born there. Victor is very near Leadville.
His role there wasn't on the killing floor. Rather, he went right into the office at age 23, which made sense as he already had office and business experience. It seems shocking to us now, but this sort of thing wasn't unusual at the time. He was familiar with business as he'd worked as an office boy, an established entry level white collar job, and he'd worked in a family business.
He stayed there, rising up on the Denver operation, until 1937, in what amounted to a transfer, and worked for Swift Packing in Scottsbluff Nebraska (the plant was actually in nearby Gering).*** At some time after that he became interested in the packing plant in Casper Wyoming, which he bought in the early 1940s. It's not exactly clear but it seems he may have bought it and operated it in Casper for a time before moving the family up from Scottsbluff, likely because it was a very major expenditure. Be that as it may, the family had moved up to Casper during World War Two. My father had recollection of the home front in the region from both Scottsbluff Nebraska and Casper. To complete the family side of the story, in 1949 he died at age 48, having just sold the creamery that he also bought.
This is the former packing plant as it looks today. It didn't look like this in the 1940s. Indeed, the structures on the right, in this photo, were the original structures from the 1920s and were brick. After the packing plant closed this property was purchased by a welding company which experienced a fire on the site a couple of decades ago. It's current appearance reflects its time as a welding shop.
The back of the old packing house. Packing houses were always built on rail frontage as cattle and beef were principally shipped by rail at the time.
The packing plant that he purchased had been built in 1921 by another family and it was also a family operation. They were quickly up and running and marketed all meat products of all types, as well as related products like lard, directly to stores and directly.
The location was a logical one. Casper was dead center in the the livestock range of Wyoming and also the center of business activity for the central part of the state. The packing house took cattle in all over from central Wyoming and likewise marketed it all over as well.
In order to do that, of course, it had not only a plant, but associated farm ground as well. Packing houses have to feed out cattle, and the company did.****
The original owners, as already noted, sold it after operating it for about twenty years, to my grandfather. We operated it, and acquired a creamery, until the late 1940s, when death intervened to stop it. At that time my father had just graduated from high school and was in junior college. His death put the family in a financial crisis of sorts that they adjusted to by selling the plant.
The plant itself continued in operation until the 1970s. By that time the massive consolidation of the packing industry was well under way. In its later years it made only Slim Jims, a beef stick product of General Mills. While I was never really clear on what the story was, I know that as a child there were family grumblings about how the new owners were running it, with the though generally being that it wasn't being run well. Having said that, as my father once explained to me, packing houses actually operate on a small economic margin, or at least they did. So it was impossible after a time for local packing houses to compete against the consolidating national ones.
And that's a huge problem.
It's a huge problem economically, and as it turns out, it's a huge problem in a time of crisis, such as this one.
In the novel
Red Storm Rising Tom Clancy imagined a third world war breaking out between the NATO powers and the Soviet Union. The war was precipitated, in the novel, by an Islamist engineer setting off a devastating terrorist attack inside of an oil gathering facility in the southern Soviet Union. Clancy, whose novels were always extremely well researched, theorized that the consolidation of petroleum gathering infrastructure within the USSR made it vulnerable to a singular attack such as the one he imagined. Clancy, being who he was, was probably correct on that. Clancy went on to imagine that the attack largely took out Soviet oil production and caused the Soviets to gamble on an attack on the West before oil starvation put them in a position that would put them on their knees to the west.
The irony of this is that the American corporate capitalist infrastructure on some thing is similarly vulnerable and, as we've learned since the 1990s, not only to terrorism. Indeed, so far the United States has escaped a devastating attack of that type and its frankly is probably largely immune from an attack disrupting the economy as the American economy is so vast and its infrastructure so large. But it isn't immune from an attack of much larger, natural, forces.
Giant Gulf coast refinery at Port Arthur, Texas. The Gulf Coast from Houston in Port Arthur is practically one giant refinery.
We learned that, or should have, form Gulf hurricanes of the past two decades that had the impact of massively disrupting the petroleum refining infrastructure. The US still refines petroleum in the nation's interior, but a massive shift has occurred in the system since the 1970s. Up until then, petroleum tended to be refined near where it was produced as crude. Starting with the 1970s, however, it started to be produced in giant refineries along the Gulf coast. Now most of it is refined there and local refineries are basically hanging on until their practical extended life ceases. The petroleum industry doesn't build refineries in Wyoming, Nebraska, or Oklahoma anymore, it builds them in Texas on the Gulf.
Indeed, just looking around will reveal that. Casper Wyoming was the home of three refineries up until the 1970s. Now it has one. In the 1940s, and perhaps later, Laramie had a refinery. That's long in the past. Midwest and Glenrock once had refineries. The same story could be played out all over Wyoming and the oil producing regions of the US.
Petroleum isn't meat, of course, but the analogy is interesting similar. Natrona County Wyoming had four refineries, three in Casper and one in Midwest, as the oil was produced here and in neighboring counties. It still is, but now it has only one. That oil is going elsewhere to be refined.
Likewise, Casper had a meat packing plant as the beef was raised here. It still is. Now that beef is going elsewhere.
And hence the infrastructure weakness. When hurricanes damage Gulf refineries it hurts the entire nation.
And when a viral storm hits the United States and impacts a meat packing plant, that's now the case for the US as well.
This need not be the case at all.
All of the constituents to feed out and pack beef that existed in the 1940s in Wyoming and Nebraska still do. Near Casper Wyoming, where we've been discussing, there are still not only many ranches, but there's also production agriculture to the west of the city. Scottsbluff, which we've also been discussing, remains even more ideally suited for packing.
And if that was the case, that local packer would employ locals at wages that are better than Walmart wages. Not only people in the plant either, but truck drivers and professionals whose work would be ancillary to the plant. Indeed, drivers, lawyers, doctors accountants, etc. etc.
And farmers too, in an era in which farm ground is constantly under threat from development.
And yet the nearest meat packing plant today is the Monfort plant in Greeley Colorado, which belongs to the Brazilian ag production giant JBS. That ownership alone says something, and not something good either.
When my grandfather owned the local packing plant, two Marine Corps veterans came home from World War Two and founded a local grocery store, something else that's a thing of the past. When they did that, they found they were short of cash and couldn't stock their meat counter. My grandfather provided them the meat on credit. I.e., he let them pay for it when they later could, which they did. They were so grateful for it that they mentioned it on a radio interview decades later and repeatedly mentioned to me whenever I happened to stop in the store.
A big chain packer isn't going to do that.
*As this story developed, he died in his 40s and perhaps because of that I not only never knew him, or my other grandfather who also died before I was born, but most of the information I have about him was from my father and his siblings. Perhaps because of his early death, which occured on the birthday of one of my aunts, they did not speak a good deal about their early lives. They did some, but not as much as a person normally does. I think the event was simply too painful.
When they did, it tended to come in the form of singular stories that were unlikely to be repeated again, and their focus varied by the teller. Stories told by my aunts were on different topics than my father. Details on their grandparents were extremely rare, and if they were told were much, much more likely to be about their grandparents in Denver, perhaps because my grandmother of that line lived much longer than my grandfather. Indeed, they were more likely to speak about their Colorado grandparents and even some Colorado relatives than their early lives and father. This began to change once they were in their fifties, but not before then.
This being the case, a few details here are pulled from an obituary, which includes a few details that I wasn't previously aware of. Knowing that obituaries are always pulled together from details provided by a family under stress, I wonder if some of them are in error. For example, the obituary relates that he left Cudahy in 1938, but I know that it was 1937. The obituary also relates that he purchased the local packing plant in 1945, but another one pulled from Nebraska suggests that it was actually in the early 1940s and he moved the family up a bit later, probably due to economic reasons. I know that he was working in Scottsbluff in the early years of World War Two but I also know that the family was well established in Casper by 1945, and I know that the plant had World War Two era contracts and regulations it had to adhere to, so I suspect the plant was likely purchased around 1943 at hte latest but that it took some time so save the money to buy a house in Casper and that likely came in 1944 or 1945.
The information that he was in Dyersville at age 23 and moved from there is solely taken from the obituary which omits any reference to his having lived in San Francisco. I suspect that at the time of his death San Francisco, which he certainly wasn't ashamed of given his keeping of the Cunard photograph in his office, was something that was simply omitted as too difficult to accurately relate at the time of his death. However, I cannot discount that the age of "23" was an error for "13", which may have well have occured at the newspaper obit printing level.
**Cudahy was actually Armour Cudahy, with Armour being famous for meat products in other contexts, including the famous early 20th Century military "Armour Rations". It had been founded in Omaha in 1887. In 1981 Cudahy was purchased by Bar S Foods. It was subsequently sold to Mexican packer Sigma Aliamentos in 2010.
***The Gering plant was recently demolished. It had been out of use since the early 2000s.
****Today that farm ground has all been developed as part of the Town of Evansville Wyoming.
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