Livestock Industry

Livestock Industry. Various means of marketing livestock developed in colonial America. Boston became a market town in the seventeenth century, as did nearby Brighton a century later, as holding pens surrounded slaughterhouses where citizens purchased fresh meat. Similar arrangements existed at Lancaster, Pennsylvania and on Manhattan Island in the Middle Colonies and farther south in Carolina “cowpens.” As settlers migrated westward to Kentucky and Ohio, Louisville and Cincinnati emerged as leaders in the livestock industry. Processing techniques introduced by German hog butchers influenced the mid‐nineteenth‐century meat industries while turnpikes and canals facilitated marketing.

The industry boomed after the Civil War with three new developments: cattle raised on the West Texas frontier were driven northward to reach more lucrative markets; the transcontinental railroad expanded westward through Kansas; and insulated (later refrigerated) railroad cars were built to carry processed meat to burgeoning eastern cities. Businessmen like Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour of Chicago, investing in modern meat slaughtering facilities near railroad‐terminal locations and becoming part‐owners of large stockyards adjacent to the meat packing plants, made the livestock industry the nation's largest business in the 1880s and 1890s.

Early market centers, with the incorporation dates of their stockyards, included Chicago in 1865 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1869. Kansas City, St. Louis, and St. Joseph, Missouri; Peoria, Illinois; and Indianapolis, Indiana, followed in the 1870s. The 1880s brought very rapid growth, with stockyards incorporated in Omaha, Nebraska; Sioux City, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; St. Paul, Minnesota; Fort Worth and San Antonio, Texas; and Wichita, Kansas. Between 1889 and 1916, a new group of livestock centers combining with packing plants emerged, including Sioux Falls, South Dakota; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Oklahoma City; and Ogden, Utah. Facilitated by this network of large market centers, packing facilities, stockyards, and booming railroads, the nation's livestock moved rapidly, expanded to a world market, and supplied the nation's allies in World War I. Fears of excessive profits and monopoly brought calls for regulation resulting in the creation of the federal Packers and Stockyards Administration in 1921. This agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture began court proceedings and forced meatpackers to divest themselves of stockyards, railroads, cattle‐loan companies, and similar businesses. The agency remains a watchdog for the industry.

Following World War II, the livestock industry accelerated an earlier decentralization into country auctions or direct sales to packers that avoided federal regulation. In addition, railroads declined in importance as large trucks increasingly carried animals to market. As consumers demanded grain‐fed beef, feedlots developed near grain‐producing areas and modern meatpacking facilities relocated near the feedlots. The large stockyards’ century of dominance faded as more and more of them closed.

By the end of the twentieth century a new group of packers with a new process called “boxed beef” marketed a large percentage of the nation's meat supply. The twenty‐first‐century livestock industry involves computer technology in management and marketing, stricter environmental and pollution laws, and increased trading opportunities in animal futures. Country auctions for small operators, video sales, new breeds, specialty breed shows, and the use of private airplanes to locate animals all had a place in this enduring and ever‐evolving industry.
See also Agriculture; Canals and Waterways; Cowboys; Economic Regulation; Mass Production; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Urbanization; West, The.

Bibliography

J'Nell L. Pate , Livestock Legacy: The Fort Worth Stockyards 1887–1987, 1988.
Charles Ball , The Finishing Touch: A History of the Cattle Feeders Association and Cattle Feeding in the Southwest, 1992.

J'Nell L. Pate