Beef Industry Sees World Of Changes In The Years

www.agrinews-pubs.com
Nat Williams
2010-06-22

MT. VERNON, Ill. — There have been a number of changes in the beef industry over the past 100-plus years. And one of the biggest changes may be the animals.

Dave Seibert, a University of Illinois Extension animal systems educator, has seen many of the changes in his 42-year career. He discussed them during a recent meeting of the Southern Illinois Beef Association.

Cattlemen have made radical improvements in beef production over the past 60 years. One statistic that bears that out is the average production per head. In 1950 it was 244 pounds, but last year the average was 632 pounds.

Seibert demonstrated the differences in the ideal size of bulls by showing slides of champions of various cattle shows through the years. In the late 1800s, the bulls — British-bred and Longhorn offspring - were large-frame cattle.

That trend continued until the 1930s, when cattlemen began breeding smaller-framed beef cows, so-called “belt buckle” cattle.

“As we moved into the late ‘30s into the ‘40s we started breeding cattle down a little bit,” Seibert said. “We took those bigger-framed cattle and we were ratcheting down.”

The reason was tied to the marketplace.

“At that time the market the highest price for cattle that were fattened on forages, on grass, because that was really our finishing,” Seibert said. “We started to breed cattle that were finished on grass. There’s a little push for these cattle in the 2000s.”

The small-frame cattle trend came to a fairly abrupt stop when the regressive gene of dwarfism began showing up more and more.

“I’m convinced that was a result of continuing to select and select and select small-frame cattle,” the educator said. “That’s because we did not have a way of identifying those animals that were a carrier of that gene and those animals that were not a carrier.”

Breeders then began focusing on larger-frame cattle finished on grains, as is the standard today.

“Things kind of go in a cycle,” Seibert said. “When we got into the ‘50s we were ratcheting these cattle down to be small-framed, early maturing kind of cattle. These kinds of cattle brought the most money.”

One can easily track the changing size of bulls by looking at the humans accompanying their animals at various cattle shows through the years.

Breeders standing behind their bulls are easy to identify during the “belt buckle” days. But in photos of bulls in the 1980s, many of the humans are totally blocked by the large-framed cattle.

Another major change in the industry occurred in the 1950s, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture changed the grading nomenclature.

“The old grades of prime and choice were now called prime,” Seibert said. “The old grade of good is now called choice. They felt that ‘good’ wasn’t something that had a good connotation. They felt the word select’ was much more desirable to the consuming public going to the meat counter.”

The person who arguably had the most impact on the beef industry over the past century was not a breeder, politician or scientist. It was a businessman.

“In the 1950s, a guy by the name of Ray Kroc, opened the first McDonald’s in Des Plaines,” Seibert said. “McDonald’s has had a major impact on the food industry, and especially, the beef industry.”

The decade of the 1950s was a watershed time for the industry for other reasons. The Illinois Performance Testing Program for beef cattle was established in 1955. The breed associations also introduced their own testing programs in the ‘50s.

The following decade saw the emergence and popularity of crossbred cattle. It was capped in 1969, when Conoco, a Charolais-Angus steer was named grand champion at Chicago International show.

“This had a tremendous impact on the beef cattle industry,” Seibert said. “It gave merit to crossbred animals, which was phenomenal.”

The decade of the ‘60s and the following one also saw the increase in test stations, which influenced breeding traits.

A lawsuit in the late 1970s also helped revolutionize breeding. It made artificial insemination in Angus cattle legal.

“It gave everybody access to all the genetics,” Seibert said. “It really benefited the smaller breeders, because they never had access to those genetics, unless they were buying a son. It’s been a tremendously powerful tool in the industry.”

The 1990s saw other changes, most notably the popularity of management intensive grazing and trend toward breeding black cattle. Also in the decade, a national beef quality audit pointed out problems with consistency and lack of marbling.

The ‘90s also saw the release by USDA of a food pyramid, which de-emphasized consumption of red meat. The 2000s saw the rapid growth of the ethanol industry and with it the availability of distiller’s grains for use as feed.

“The distiller industry came in, and we got the byproducts out of those that really gave us, for the first time, a competitive advantage,” Seibert said.

The first case of so-called “mad cow disease” in the United States was identified in 2003, in a Holstein cow imported to the United States from Canada.

“If anything shook the beef cattle industry, this is it, when we had our first BSE case” Seibert said. “It impacted what price you got. Though we’ve regained some of that export, we haven’t regained it all.”

The future of the industry may lie in what Seibert calls the “gene shakers,” scientists who have introduced genetic engineering to cattle herds.


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