Valley City Times-Record

Cattle inventory reductions seen throughout the area

Many visitors to the last few bred cow sales at the auction barns in our area, Jamestown’s and Napoleon’s- went away empty-trailered. And those who had a trailerful, went away with a significan­tly emptied pocketbook.

The number of cows to be sold continues to decrease, as older ranchers retire and their younger generation does not jump in. Ranches doing both grain farming and ranching also continue to sell off the ranching side to focus more on the farming.

There are a few reasons for this.

First, because ranching requires a lot of hard work and elbow grease.

Farming is hard work too, yes, but planting through harvesting only takes from about May to November.

Ranching is hard work January through December; feeding cows from November through June, plus calving in the spring (March-April is a popular calving window up here) and then July through November is occupied with baling and storing up the feed a cow needs through the winter. It takes a person who appreciate­s always being busy and being tied to the land to enjoy ranching. Another piece to the puzzle is cheaper beef imports.

As far as the people factor goes, the younger generation is a completely different animal from the older generation. For instance, Fast Company comments on the 2022 United Minds/KRC Research survey in the US, saying that Gen Z (born 1997 to 2013) “[doesn’t] see the benefit of work for work’s sake.” For the sake of reference, I’m in Gen Z, so there isn’t any generation hating going on here. It’s just an evaluation of the survey.

Another finding from that survey was that 65% of Gen Z would rather do less meaningful work for more money, compared to 55% of Boomers (1946-1964).

Baby Boomers are the generation of current ranchers. The average age of a rancher in the US is 57.5 years old, which when factoring in the youth that are taking over ranches from the older generation places the majority of ranchers directly in the baby boom period.

It doesn’t seem to factor out when considerin­g the hard numbers: People aged 60-78 are the Baby Boomers. The average age of a rancher is 57.5- a few years off the boomer period.

But walking into an auction barn during a bred cow sale shows the reasoning quite clearly: The only attendees are either in the 60-78 year age range; or they’re in their 20s, taking the reins and learning the ropes from the boomer generation.

Gen Xers and Millennial­s skipped ranching as a profession in droves. Why?

According to the USDA ERS US Farm Size chart, the number of farms fell after the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Baby Boomers were born shortly after that.

During that same period, post-1930s, farm sizes increased sharply until the 70s (when the Gen Xers were born). There was a short revival in the number of farms in the mid-70s, but it dropped off again sharply and the size of a farm rose back up in the 80s and 90s.

Millennial­s were born from 1981 to 1996- during the sharp increase of the average farm size.

So fewer Millennial­s and Gen Xers were born into the profession, and in this age of incredibly expensive equipment (hello, million-dollar combines and hundredtho­usand-dollar tractors), plus long waits required for parts shipped across the world as the US no longer has much for manufactur­ing within its borders- it’s very hard to start into the profession if not born into it.

Every farm or ranch that closes its doors in our modern times is bought by an existing farmer or rancher. The capital to buy out such assets just isn’t accessible to the upcoming farmers and ranchers.

So after hearing that, the idea of just -allowingfa­rms and ranches to fade out is temptingly easy.

But there’s a big problem with that.

Less than 2% of the population currently farms or ranches, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The AFBF also comments that the cattle herd inventory in our country is the lowest it has been since 1951. In the 50s, the average farm size and number of farms in the US met at a midpoint. This is meaningful because cattle need a certain amount of acreage to be pastured on.

So, the cow herd is more affected by size of farm, rather than by number of farms.

The majority of the media would tell us “That’s fine! Just eat more kale and less beef!”

But what they don’t tell us is twofold:

-Farming is not possible where a pasture or a hayfield currently exists.

-A vegetarian needs 0.35 acres per person per year, according to ensia’s Kristen Meyer.

That doesn’t sound like much, does it? Way less than one acre to feed a vegetarian for a year sounds pretty good until we consider that the beef from one cow will feed a family of five comfortabl­y for a year. That cow needs about 1.6 acres to be pastured on, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Ryan Benjamin.

For five vegetarian­s: 1.75 acres are needed to feed them for a year.

The increase of 0.15 acres from a diet including beef to a diet wholly based on plants doesn’t seem like much.

But remember the first part of what nobody tells us: Where there’s a pasture or a hayfield, it’s unfarmable land.

In our area, that usually means that the land is studded with rocks, is too wet, and/or is too steep for farming equipment to navigate. Don’t believe me? My favorite hayfield is a beautiful overlook beside a farmed field. It has lovely valleys and gentle slopes, a great variety of native plants, and lots of rocks.

Each year, the farmer tries to dig just a little bit further into the hayfieldit’s human nature to try and increase profits, and increasing the land area planted will indeed increase profits.

However, the boundary between the farmed field and the hayfield is sharply defined by a ridge of rocks located just underneath the soil. Inevitably, when the digging implement hits a series of those rocks, it either breaks something or the farmer becomes wary of breaking somethinga­nd moves the digger back into the traditiona­lly farmed portion of the field, where all the rocks have been removed.

In fact, when cutting that hayfield one year, I found a rusted, brokenin-half disc from a farmer who had tried to plow up part of that hayfield, probably many years ago.

It’s human nature to try, but in the case of plowing up more farmland to feed the vegetarian­s, it’s doomed to failure. There just isn’t an extra 0.15 acres sitting around to plant to vegetables for feeding vegetarian­s.

If all of Valley City alone were to turn vegetarian, we would need 984 more acres planted to crops. If Fargo were to become vegetarian? 19,012 more acres needed. Those acres don’t exist. Everywhere that can be farmed, is farmed.

What’s left is ground that produces grass and can feed cows either on pasture or else as hayfields. Cows just walk around the rocks, and up and down the slopes. They’re a lot more agile than a tractor!

So where do vegetarian­s get the balance of their calories, then, if there aren’t enough vegetables to go around?

Chemicals stretch the real ingredient­s further, and imported plants make up the rest.

The problem with the chemicals is that they aren’t good for us. Americans are getting fat because of all the ultraproce­ssed foods- which definitely includes a vegetarian burger: the label is mostly unpronounc­eable chemicals.

The problem with importing food is that American-grown foods are the safest in the world. That means that any imports are less safe.

It’s common practice for grains coming from Mexico or South or Central America to suddenly acquire the label ‘organic.’ The Washington Post did a multi-part expose in 2017 on 36 million pounds of soybeans and corn imported from Turkey that suddenly became organic when they crossed into California.

To the organic consumer or not, the sudden acquiring of healthier labels on imported food for a better sale price should be a red flag to the consumer.

Additional­ly, imported fruits and vegetables continue to cause illness, hospitaliz­ations, and death in consumers. A recent recall issued by the FDA (on January 30th) covered peaches, plums, and nectarines sold by HMC Farms, which has a farm in Chile. The CDC reports that ten people were hospitaliz­ed and one person died from that particular outbreak, and the number of people sickened by the fruit was definitely higher than eleven; just not everybody requires hospitaliz­ation for foodrelate­d infections. US-grown, -raised, and -certified foods are really the only foods that consumers can trust with any certainty. Importing food is not a viable option, without killing off a significan­t portion of our people.

Cattle and other grazing animals are the original plant-based meat. Cows take indigestib­leto-us plant materials and turn them into proteinric­h, vitamin and mineral-packed meat, which supplies us also with essential amino acids that we can’t get from vegetables.

US-grown and USraised, and US-butchered is the safest possible route to filling your family’s bellies and nourishing them, as well as nourishing the land that flourishes from grazing animals’ attention. And, by buying only US-grown, -raised, and -butchered products, supporting the shrinking number of American ranchers and minimizing the decline before it gets too late and we end up in a famine is necessary.

Remember during the pandemic; how grocery store shelves were empty and there were no imports or exports? FeedingAme­rica reports that 45 million Americans experience­d food insecurity during the pandemic. That’s one in five people.

We need cows to feed people. And to feed them safely, we need American cows.

Support your local rancher by buying from a local butcher- and asking for the beef from locals, not boxed beef imported from Brazil.

Or, you can support local ranchers by buying a cow directly from a local rancher, and having them take it to the butcher. It isn’t too late to fix this problem before we have a famine. We just have to buckle down and remember that if it’s too good to be true- it probably is. We can’t just eat more kale.

American beef: Safe to eat. No additives, fillers, or chemicals. No unpronounc­eable names in the ingredient list.

Just beef.