Cattle Beet Capital
eBook - ePub

Cattle Beet Capital

Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado

  1. 358 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Cattle Beet Capital

Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado

About this book

In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that transformation happen? Cattle Beet Capital is animated by that question.

Expanding outward from Greeley to all of northern Colorado, Cattle Beet Capital shows how the beet sugar industry came to dominate the region in the early twentieth century through a reciprocal relationship with its growers that supported a healthy and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously exploiting tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Michael Weeks shows how the state provided much of the scaffolding for the industry in the form of tariffs and research that synchronized with the agendas of industry and large farmers. The transformations that led to commercial feedlots began during the 1930s as farmers replaced crop rotations and seasonal livestock operations with densely packed cattle pens, mono-cropped corn, and the products pouring out of agro-industrial labs and factories. Using the lens of the northern Colorado region, Cattle Beet Capital illuminates the historical processes that made our modern food systems.


 
 

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Yes, you can access Cattle Beet Capital by Michael Weeks in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Agribusiness. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. 1. Cultivating a Regional Agroecology
  10. 2. Capitalism and Sustainable Farming
  11. 3. Beet Biology and the Nature of Labor
  12. 4. Piedmont Sugar and the State of Science
  13. 5. The Economics of Mechanization and Watershed Engineering
  14. 6. Building the Petrochemical Paradigm
  15. 7. Manufacturing Beef
  16. Perspective
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index
  20. About Michael Weeks