An American Livestock Story, Where Does It End?
By Jim Mundorf
“Stories and stories- a storyteller has all kinds of stories going at one time out of which he hopes he can find one story he can tell at one time..”
“Tell your story.” I’m betting you’ve been told this, and being the self-centered creatures we are, when we think about our story, we think about our day to day lives and try to understand the story we would tell, but what if we told the bigger story? Where do you or your generation fit in to the larger story? As I look at the story of the livestock industry that I grew up with, work in, and write about, for some reason, I can only see myself in one part of this story… the ending.
“He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself. ”
My story started when they brought me home from the hospital to a farm my parents rented. It was a mile up a dirt road from my grandparents’ place. This country is filled with stories that started on grandparents’ places’. Mine seems to be becoming more and more unique, because I am one of the few whose story continues there.
Grandpa bought the place back in the 40’s when he returned from the war in Japan. If you picture in your mind, a farmer that was raised during the Depression, you are probably picturing something close to my Grandpa. He was more farmer than he was human. When my mom was growing up, he milked eight cows a day, he raised hogs and cattle from birth to slaughter, they sold the eggs from their chickens along with growing corn, oats, and hay.
Grandpa, Glen Barr with my Mom, Nancy and Aunt Joann.
The dairy cattle were gone long before I came around, so were most the chickens. (My mom kept a few around for our own eggs.) I grew up with cattle and hogs and we farmed corn and soybeans and still raised hay and oats for feed. That was the farm of my early childhood.
Then when I was 7 Dad bought his own place, complete with cattle feeding facilities, and we moved a few miles up the road and started feeding cattle. This was different from what Grandpa was doing. Grandpa had a small cow herd, that would have calves. When the calves were big enough he would wean the them and feed them up to finished (butcher) weight then sell them at the stockyards. Dad was going to feed cattle, meaning along with our weaned calves, he would also buy more calves at the auction barns and feed them in the pens on our place up to finishing weight and he would haul them to Omaha to sell at the stockyards. We grew all of the feed on our place. It was a lot of work but if you did it right there was money to be made.
Me and Thunder in Dad’s new feedlot.
“If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a historian, must follow compassion wherever it leads him.”
Grandpa loved working with livestock, but I think he loved his hogs the most, and for good reason. Hogs used to be called the, “mortgage lifters” meaning if you had hogs around you could always sell some to get the mortgage paid. As a kid it seemed like he kept hogs everywhere, in the barn, in the cattle pens, and he had little sheds on skids that he would drag around the fields in the winter, and pastures in the summer.
In the 90’s Grandpa was in his 80’s and the hogs were getting to be too much for him to handle. I remember him asking me if I would go in to the hog business with him. I was in junior high, and as a wanna be Cowboy, I didn’t have much interest in hogs, but I asked Dad about it anyway. There had been massive hog buildings put up in the neighborhood and Dad could see the writing on the wall. He told me there was no money in it unless we expanded what we were doing, and Dad wanted to focus on feeding cattle. I turned Grandpa down and we sold out of the hog business.
A couple years later, in 1998, the market for hogs completely collapsed. A 250 lb hog that was recently worth about $135 was all of a sudden worth about $20. A sow that would have 6-8 piglets twice a year wasn’t worth the feed to keep her alive. All the farms that depended on hogs to, “lift the mortgage” went broke, the others simply liquidated and tried to survive. The only producers to continue in the hog business were the massive hog confinement farms who were forced into contracts with meat packers. By 2000 the story of hogs on the small family farm had, for the most part, came to an end.
A few years later in the early 2000s, new environmental regulations were coming for small cattle feeders that would force them to either expand their operations or get out. It was a lot of work feeding cattle twice a day seven days a week, and keeping everything healthy. With the new regulations came new expenses, and it no longer made sense to feed 300-500 head of cattle on the crops you raise. Now you needed to feed 2-3,000 if you wanted to make it worth while. Again, we were faced with the decision of a massive expansion or quit, and again like many of our neighbors, our cattle feeding story came to an end.
“One of the chief privileges of man is to speak up for the universe.”
As a kid these things happen and life goes on without much notice, but as the years go by you start to realize the significance of the changes that have occurred in your life and how they fit into the larger story, a story that you’re still playing a part in.
I think about how, when Grandpa was around my age, he built a new building on his place. The building would come to be called the hog house. It was built for farrowing and raising young hogs. I’m sure when he built it, it was like all new projects, filled with hopes and dreams of what was to come… but then I think about what it would’ve been like for an 80 year old man to watch his last load of hogs go out of that building up the chute, and into the trailer. What was it like to walk back through those empty pens and buildings that he’d spent a lifetime building up, knowing it was all over? Did he take it all for granted when he was my age? Are we taking what’s left for granted?
Our little cow herd remains on Grandpa’s farm. We raise our calves, wean them, and background them(start feeding them grain in a lot) then we sell them at the local sale barn. As I get older I now realize the significance of the changes that have happened here. During my Mothers life she has seen her father’s farm go from raising dairy cattle, chickens, hogs and beef cattle to now only raising calves up to just past weaning stage. During my life I have seen the end of hogs on small farms followed by the end of small cattle feedlots. Considering all that it, now seems almost inevitable that I will be part of the last generation to raise livestock on a small farm.
Grandpa helping work cattle in his 90’s.
Grandpa saw 93 years go by and he died in 2006. In August his first great, great, grandchild was born and my brother who now lives on Grandpa’s place became a Grandpa himself. This spring that baby will be brought out to visit the baby calves in what was once known as the hog house. My brother has converted the building, and it is now known as the calving barn. It’s where the calves are kept when they are newborns. Hopes will be high for that baby to have his own cattle to raise someday, but the question is, will we leave him with any? Will he look back, like I do, and remember his Grandpa and the animals that were once in that barn?
Endings are hard. No one wants to think about how their stories will end, so the end becomes easy to ignore, but if we don’t ignore it could we stave it off? Can we slow down the continuous consolidation, and get these cows to the next generation? If we study our stories and the the endings of the past maybe we can prolong ours. The best stories are the ones where you can never guess the ending… but if Shakespeare has taught us anything, it’s that some of the most beautiful stories simply must end in tragedy.
“There’s a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me.”
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Jim Mundorf is the owner of Lonesome Lands and The Drover House. He also works on his family’s farm in Southwest Iowa.
