-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Kendra Smith-Howard, Michael Weeks. Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 767–768, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae076
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
By the 1970s, Northern Colorado’s landscape embodied industrialized agriculture—it harbored enormous pens of cattle, bunkers of corn silage, and pits of manure. Cattle Beet Capital seeks to explain how this system came about. As historian Michael Weeks demonstrates, Northern Colorado was not always a slaughterhouse zone. In the 1870s, reformers like Nathaniel Meeker and Horace Greeley articulated a different vision of agricultural development, one of cooperative community, based in intensive, irrigated agriculture. These earlier agricultural settlers raised cattle, but less for their meat than their manure; the nitrogen-rich wastes added essential nitrogen to the soil and boosted yields of potatoes, grains, and legumes. How was it that a mixed cultivation system of the 1870s gave way to the feedlot system of the 1970s? This question provides the arc of Weeks’s book.
Cattle Beet Capital reveals as many continuities as discontinuities in the region’s agricultural development. When Northern Colorado farmers introduced sugar beets in the early twentieth century, they cultivated sugar beets in rotation with crops like alfalfa and legumes, which restored the soil. Farmers who turned to beets did not abandon cattle, for manure remained an important fertilizer. Cattle consumed the beet pulp byproducts of sugar refining, providing a key link in an interdependent agricultural system. After describing these agricultural patterns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the author devotes the middle of the book to tracing essential building blocks of Northern Colorado agriculture: labor, water, and by the post–World War II period, petrochemically derived fertilizers and herbicides. The book ends with a rich description of the feedlot system’s operation in the 1960s and 1970s.
