Raising Cattle by Computer

Greeley, Colo., has a population of 43,000 human beings and several hundred thousand head of beef cattle. The cattle can be found in hundreds of feeder pens within miles of the city's center, drinking, snoozing and, most important, eating. In the most modern of these operations, the food is blended by highly sophisticated, computerized feed mills. Last week TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief Richard L. Duncan visited Greeley and sent this report on the sights, sounds and smells of a thoroughly streamlined feed-lot operation:

Moving from range to feed lot must be as disorienting for cattle as moving from the New Guinea rain forest to Manhattan would be for a Pygmy. The first stop at Dick Farr's 35,000-animal feed lot is a receiving area where, says Farr, "we can dip, brand, castrate and vaccinate them in 30 seconds." Then the animals get their first taste of eating feed-lot-style. The first meal is alfalfa hay, which smells something like familiar range grass, mixed with a little bit of high-protein feed. Their diet is made "hotter" by adding larger proportions of corn, malt, sour-smelling silage, beet pulp, minerals and antibiotics. The animal's metabolism is soon racing so hard to digest the rich fare that if its diet is drastically changed, the steer will sicken and could die.

The food is delivered to the pens by trucks, which are routed by computer. When an empty truck pulls up to Farr's $1 million feed mill, the woman operator perched in a control center (so well sealed that the air smells of ozone instead of the all-pervasive manure) spots the truck's number and identifies the feeding pen it is delivering to. She inserts a punch card carrying dietary instructions for the animals in that pen into the computer, which automatically dispenses the proper proportions of food into the truck. The truck then drives slowly along the troughs, spilling feed through a chute practically into the open mouths of the gluttonous cattle.

This computerized efficiency extends to the cattle themselves. When a hundred cattle are feeding at a bunker, one can detect no more than an inch or so of variation in the height of their identical-looking rumps. Uniformity is only partly the result of breeding. More important than genetics are the skillful methods used to turn every calf into a 1,100-lb., slightly blocky steer that will yield USDA Choice Grade Beef. The object is to remove as many variables from the beef-raising process as possible and replace them with more stable techniques copied from the assembly line. "If we do things a little bit better than the others," says Farr, "when we lose money, we'll lose less. And when we make it, we'll make a little more." Henry Ford would have felt at home in Greeley.

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