The big beef: Why feedlots are a concern

BROKEN BOW, Neb. — Seen from a mile away, Nebraska's largest feedlot looks something like a rag rug of black, white and orange fibers set into the rounded curves of grassy hills.

You need to look closely to see that the fibers are, in fact, a metropolis of meat, more than 80,000 head of beef cattle being fattened for slaughter.

The Adams Land & Cattle Co.'s feeding operation has become a bulwark of the economy of Broken Bow and of Custer County. It employs 185 people full time; it supports local farmers by buying more than 12 million bushels of corn a year. The three Adams brothers are local guys, not some faceless corporation, and they are generally admired in the cattle industry and in the town.

But residents of Broken Bow describe times when the smell from the feedlot is too nauseating to bear going outside. They talk about the "fecal fog," an atomized, reddish manure dust stirred up by the hooves of thousands of cattle that collects in gutters, on cars, in birdbaths and on the shoes of people who walk in the grass.

Even here in the heart of cattle country, where agriculture represents not just jobs but the root of community values and pride, some people say they had no choice but to take a stand against something that has swollen into a behemoth.

"It just isn't agriculture. It isn't normal," said Beverly Burt, a 30-year Broken Bow resident who joined a lawsuit against the feedlot. "It's not like that was down there 50 years ago and we were stupid enough to come move here and build a town a mile away."

A fault line in community

The lawsuit ultimately failed, but it and an earlier petition drive defined a fault line that divided the community.

A banker whose institution held the feedlot's accounts started the lawsuit. A nurse and her husband, a city utility worker who once used to boast that he lived near the feedlot, found themselves in the unnerving position of bucking a small town's power structure.

They are not alone. Across the Great Plains, many communities near increasingly vast animal-feeding operations, whether they feed cattle, poultry or swine, are fighting the location or the expansion of those feedlots.

American beef increasingly is fattened in enormous feeding operations like Adams Land & Cattle. The new economics of meat dictate it: Size allows cattle feeders to purchase in bulk the grain, antibiotics and hormones that fuel the rapid growth of beef cattle before slaughter. Size also is an advantage for feeders in dealing with large meatpackers, such as the big IBP plant in nearby Lexington, which moved its operations to the Great Plains during the 1990s.

But Burt and others worry about the health effects from breathing the dust and gases produced by animal waste and from being exposed to chemicals that might get into the water or air.

And, as scientists have started to become aware that millions of pounds of antibiotics and steroids used by U.S. agriculture are seeping into America's waterways, they have become worried as well.

Animal-feeding operations are a significant part of the water pollution caused by U.S. agriculture, the leading source of pollution of the nation's lakes and rivers, said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Becky Kaminski launched a petition drive over the Broken Bow feedlot that collected about 900 signatures — a number equivalent to one-quarter of the population of Broken Bow.

The odor, they say, is driving people out of the town, which lost 8 percent of its population between 1990 and 2000.

In a community where many people's livelihoods are connected to the feedlot, the tension their fight created was a difficult thing for Kaminski. One night, an angry farmer called her, demanding to know whether she was trying to put him out of business.

A consolidating industry

Like ranches, feedlots have gotten larger in size and fewer in number, an advantage in the rapidly consolidating food industry, where four meatpacking companies now control 81 percent of the beef cattle slaughtered in the United States, according to researchers at the University of Missouri.

"Packers, they've already gone through this consolidation and movement to larger-size plants, so they are interested in buying larger groups of cattle to keep their daily kills going," said Clement Ward, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University.

While a few feedlots have capacities of more than 100,000 animals, Adams Land & Cattle is near the upper limit of feedlot size in the United States, Ward said. But those mega-sized operations are the ones growing the most quickly. The largest feedlot category tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, those with a capacity of 32,000 animals or more, grew in number from 73 in 1990 to 118 in 2001, and they now produce almost half the cattle fattened in feedlots.

A massive silver feed mill rises in the middle of the Adams complex like a rocket at its gantry. Corn, the staple of a diet calibrated to quickly fatten young cattle for slaughter, is heaped in a landfill-sized mound of yellow.

It was only when the Adams operation expanded during the 1990s, from a capacity of about 20,000 to 85,000 head of cattle on the south lot, that the odor began to be unbearable in Broken Bow, say those who launched the petition drive and legal battle against it in 1999. Adams has a second, 8,000-animal feedlot on the eastern edge of Broken Bow.

Lawrence Adams, president of Adams Land & Cattle, said the company has worked hard to reduce odor and dust in Broken Bow.

At a stalemate

For now, Broken Bow's feedlot dispute is at a stalemate.

Custer County is one of a handful of Nebraska counties that lack zoning regulations that could have limited the feedlot's growth during the 1990s, although the county is working on regulations for future expansions. State environmental officials don't have the authority to regulate odor, and they say the feedlot is in compliance with all state regulations.

The plaintiffs dropped their suit because, they say, they lacked the money to pursue it after a judge rejected class-action status.