Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado

347 Pages·2022·17.597 MB·English

by  Michael Weeks

Cattle
Beet
Capital

Cattle
Beet
Making
Industrial
Agriculture
Capital
in Northern
Colorado
MICHAEL WEEKS
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln
© 2022 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska
Portions of chapters 4 and 5 first appeared as “Measuring
Expertise: Ralph Parshall and Watershed Management,
1910– 1940,” in The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s
Environmental Histories, ed. Brian Frehner and
Kathleen A. Brosnan (University of Nebraska Press,
2021), 179– 201, and “Sugar State: Industry, Science,
and Nation in Colorado’s Sugar Beet Fields,” Western
Historical Quarterly 48 (October 2017): 367– 91.
All rights reserved
The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-
grant institution with campuses and programs on the
past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee,
Ponca, Otoe- Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw,
Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the
relocated Ho- Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Weeks, Michael (Historian), author.
Title: Cattle beet capital: making industrial agriculture
in Northern Colorado / Michael Weeks
Other titles: Making industrial agriculture
in Northern Colorado
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
[2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2022000527
isbn 9781496208415 (hardback)
isbn 9781496232304 (epub)
isbn 9781496232311 (pdf)
Subjects: lcsh: Cattle— Feeding and feeds— Colorado. |
Cattle trade— Colorado. | Beef industry— Colorado. |
bisac: history / United States / State & Local / West
(ak, ca, co, hi, id, mt, nv, ut, wy) | business
& economics / Industries / Agribusiness
Classification: lcc hd9433.c6 w44 2022 |
ddc 338.1/76209788— dc23/eng/20220208
lc record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022000527
Set in Minion Pro by Laura Buis.
Designed by L. Auten.
For William (Bill) Unrau: scholar, mentor, friend

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Cultivating a Regional Agroecology 17
2. Capitalism and Sustainable Farming 47
3. Beet Biology and the Nature of Labor 77
4. Piedmont Sugar and the State of Science 107
5. The Economics of Mechanization
and Watershed Engineering 139
6. Building the Petrochemical Paradigm 171
7. Manufacturing Beef 203
Perspective 241
Notes 253
Bibliography 293
Index 315

IllustratIons
1. Aerial photograph of Monfort feedlots 3
2. Map of the Northern Colorado Piedmont 8
3. Greeley, Colorado 27
4. Portrait of John Wesley Iliff 36
5. Advertisement for Philip Boothroyd’s
Waterdale Stock Ranch 41
6. Cross section of sugar beets in the ground 52
7. U.S. sugar production and consumption,
1881– 1915 54
8. Development of the beet sugar industry on the
Northern and Southern Colorado Piedmont 59
9. Cattle eating sugar beet pulp 68
10. Multigerm sugar beet seed 78
11. Family of German Russian contract laborers
in the sugar beet fields 83
12. Typical beet shack 83
13. Sugar beet knife used by Gilbert Barela 96
14. Child slicing the top of a sugar beet at harvest 97
15. Six- year- old taking care of her baby brother 99
16. Unloading sugar beets at the Swink factory 115
17. Ad for Dupont’s Semesan Seed Disinfectant 123
18. Map of Piedmont irrigation infrastructure 127
19. Water correlated with sugar beet yields 128
20. Model of the Parshall Flume 133
21. Ralph Parshall checks on one of his flumes 133
22. U.S. sugar consumption by source, 1925–3 4 142
23. Segmenting multigerm sugar beet seeds 155
ix