Feedlot County
Late last night I returned to Arizona after spending 11 days in Nebraska aka cattle country. We left Norfolk, Nebraska yesterday in the early afternoon. We settled in for a two and a half hour drive to Omaha. I didn’t expect the drive to make me so deeply sad. I don’t even quite know how to explain my feeling about what I saw in the feedlots on my way to the airport yesterday. It’s just so hard for me to comprehend how people can have so little compassion for the lives of sentient beings that are sacrificed to fill their stomachs.
You see, we drove through Cumming County. I’m going to call it Feedlot County because that’s all we saw for many, many miles. Feedlot after feed yard after feedlot after feed yard. Don’t ask me what the difference is … their signs just read differently. They all looked the same to me. I’m going to guess that we passed about 10,000 cows and that was just what we could see from the highway.
These are not cows living happily in corn fields. They are cows living in cramped conditions, covered in mud and living in their own piss and shit. There is no where else for them to go. Now I don’t want to misinform you. I believe the farmers clean their paddocks and pick up the poo at least once a day, I hope. But the reality is that they never, ever get to walk around freely for some time alone from the other cows, wipe their hooves on grass, or to scratch their heads on corn stalks.
As we drove into Cumming County, their sign read something like “Cumming County: Doing Our Part to Feed the World”. Once I saw that, I knew things were not going to look good. I wasn’t going to find beautiful little family-run, organic farms full of kale, lettuce and broccoli. What I saw was more cows than I have ever seen in my whole life! They were sitting in mud. It was about 30 degrees outside. They had no shelter away from the elements including snow. They were pissing on the ground, then laying in it. They were eating (I’m not sure what) from troughs reaching their necks through metal bars as their big shoulders jabbed into cows on either side. They were not frolicking or looking at me with curiosity like the cows in the corn fields did.
I don’t want to assume that they were not happy cows but their living conditions looked anything but happy to me. Is it too much to ask to give them some straw to lay on? Or a barn to curl up in when the weather is below freezing? Is it too much to ask for people not to eat them?
What exactly are the benefits of treating animals this way? In a nutshell – MONEY. I looked up the Cumming County Livestock Impacts Report. The latest data was from 2002 during which “the market value of agricultural products sold in Cumming County totaled $580,999,000”. Of that amount $525,000,000 was generated from the slaughter and sale of livestock (those cows in the feedlots). Now that’s over a half billion dollars in revenue for a town of just over 9,000 people.
You would think that everybody was making a good wage … living in nice houses … driving nice cars. The report says an estimated 1,025.6 people work directly in this cattle production. They make 8.0% more income than Nebraskans working in other counties or metropolitan areas. You would never, ever guess that by driving through the town. There are no quaint restaurants or hotels. There are just farm stores, gas stations and run down buildings. So where is all that money going? Are the people that live and work in Cumming County really better off than the mechanics or postal workers in Lincoln, Nebraska?
Everything I have ever read about people employed in factory farming leads me to believe that these people don’t really live better off than other people. Albeit working in feedlot is definitely not as bad as chopping up flesh for a living in a slaughter house.
The largest, most prominent farm animal rescue, Farm Sanctuary, is miniature when compared to Cummings County. What a daunting task we vegans have ahead of us. Just knowing that places like this exist, makes the prospect of “changing hearts and minds about animals and food”, as Gene Baur says, seem insurmountable.
I don’t mean to sound judgmental about Nebraska – it’s just that the production of cattle is so raw and available there. Several times a day I had a first hand view of our meat production process. I’m fully aware that California is now the largest dairy state. My own state, Arizona, is also one of the largest cattle producing states. But I live in the city so I don’t see so much of it every day.
Obviously boycotting animal products through a vegan lifestyle is one way to help change these circumstances for cattle. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t seem like enough. What more can we do? I’m open to any and all suggestions because living vegan has become easy for me. I feel as though more needs to be done to change the way people view and value sentient beings in our distorted food production process.
I’m here in Florida – and while it’s known for citrus the state is also has a big “beef” industry too. The low land couldn’t support all the tons of manure and waste generated by these bovines – so looks like the midwest gets “lucky”. I can’t imagine all the poisons that filter through the ground water – Doesn’t look sustainable at all… and I guess that’s good news. Everyone will be vegan that much sooner – We hope.
Or everyone will just die from contaminated drinking water!