| The
“Long Drive” to Asia began much as
it did in the 1860s—on ranches, large and small,
many still family-owned cow-calf operations. Trails still
lead to Kansas, though now with the names of U.S. and
Interstate highways from all directions throughout the
Great Plains. Each year millions of cattle from other
states are shipped to feedlots located primarily in the
southwestern part of Kansas, where they are fattened for
slaughter. The cattle are finished on corn and sorghum
grown in Kansas and then slaughtered and processed at
large meatpacking plants in Garden City, Dodge City, Liberal,
Emporia, and Arkansas City. From these modern Kansas cow
towns, boxed beef follows the trail to markets in Asia.Kansas
is known for its cowboy culture and cow towns. Texas Longhorns
were driven north across a sea of grass until they reached
the railheads and cattle pens of cow towns like Abilene.
The cattle were then sold and shipped by rail to urban
centers, in particular to Chicago, to be slaughtered at
plants owned by large meatpacking companies.
The cow towns of Kansas past were perhaps not as wild
and dangerous as portrayed on television and in the
movies, but the cattle industry was extremely important
to early Kansas. The number of cattle multiplied from
only 93,000 in 1860 to 1.5 million in 1880. This first
cattle boom in Kansas started with the cow towns and
lasted until the 1880s, only to dampen in the early
1890s under changing natural and economic conditions
(Wood 1980: xi,xii).
After World War II,
a dramatic expansion in irrigation was accompanied by
rapid development of large-scale cattle feedlots near
irrigated grain fields, especially in southwestern Kansas.
According to Kansas Board of Agriculture statistics,
the percentage of cattle on feed in large Kansas feedlots
(1,000 head capacity or more) went from 26.7 percent
in 1960 to 87.6 percent in 1975. The number of large-capacity
feedlots grew from seven in 1952 to 140 by 1974, and
grain-fed cattle increased from less than half a million
in 1955 to around two million by the 1970s (Wood 1980:
286). These developments created a beef “revolution”
(Wood 1980:285).
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Kansas Pastorale I, sketch for
Topeka Murals, 1938-1940
John Steuart Curry (1897-1946)
Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas |
The dramatic expansion of feedlots was accompanied by
rapid growth in the number of beef cattle and the amount
of red meat packed in Kansas. Beef cattle numbers rose
from 4 million in 1960 to 6.8 million by 1974, and beef
production went from a billion pounds valued at US$432.8
million in 1961 to 2 billion pounds valued at US$1.5 billion
in 1974.
The growth in feedlots near the productive grain fields
of western Kansas, as well as other factors, led to
a shift in the geographic distribution of cattle from
the eastern half of Kansas to the southwest, as feedlots
and packing houses moved to small towns in that region,
though not without environmental and water usage problems
(Wood 1980:288-289).
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| By 1980, conditions were in
place for Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) to open its state-of-the-art
meat processing plant in Holcomb, outside of Garden City,
Kansas. IBP led a new breed of packers that built their
plants near feedlots and took advantage of the interstate
trucking system (Skaggs 1986:187-190). By 1987, there
were five large-capacity meatpacking plants (more than
3,000 head of cattle a day), each employing over 1,000
workers, in Emporia, Liberal, Dodge City, Holcomb, and
Garden City, the new cow towns of Kansas. The meatpacking
industry had been effectively restructured and was tied
to large-capacity plants mostly located in the southwestern
part of the state. A new cattle boom was on. |
