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Feedlot Imprimatur: Public-Private Cooperation in the Advent of Government Beef Grading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2025
Abstract
Commodity grades seem like innocuous measures of quality and thereby escape scrutiny as to their origin, purpose, and effect. Drawing on the National Live Stock and Meat Board’s executive meeting minutes and US Food Administration (USFA) records, this essay contextualizes and politicizes government beef grading. The USFA played a key role in the lead-up to government beef grading and in the creation of the Meat Board. USFA messaging as well as a post war depression curtailed consumption of feedlot-derived beef. In response, industry leaders formed a trade association called the Meat Board that acted as a liaison between industry and public sector scientists and helped bring about government beef grading. Beef grading emerged in the broader context of a campaign launched by the USFA to modernize meat retailers. At the same time, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers pushed for government beef grading in response to low prices and as a panacea. The Meat Board also cooperated with agricultural scientists in coordinating research to boost feedlot-derived beef. Rather than industry cooptation of science, this essay shows an alignment of vision in a mutually beneficial relationship. These actors, furthermore, used government beef grading to protect the feedlot system of production.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Business History Conference
References
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Milov, Sarah. “Promoting Agriculture: Farmers, the State, and Checkoff Marketing, 1935–2005.” Business History Review 90, Special Issue 3: A Special Issue on Food and Agriculture, (Autumn 2016): 505–536.10.1017/S0007680516000714CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Portz, John. “Economic Governance and the American Meatpacking Industry,” in Governance of the American Economy, eds. Campbell, John L., Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, and Lindberg, Leon N., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 259–292.10.1017/CBO9780511664083.010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Gabrial. “No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early Twentieth-Century United States.” Journal of American History 107, no. 2 (September 2020): 362–387.10.1093/jahist/jaaa179CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sayre, Nathan F. “Corn and the Range: Rethinking Ranching, Agriculture and the Feedlot.” Journal of Peasant Studies 51, no. 5 (2024): 1208–1229. doi:10.1080/03066150.2023.2284973CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skocpol, Theda, and Finegold, Kenneth, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 255–278.10.2307/2149478CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Bonterra Partners, and Sustainable Land Management. “Back to Grass: The Market Potential for U.S. Grass Fed Beef.” April 2017. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/Grassfed651547609b95501c64972f52/t/6515cfae199f715eb8b9309e/1695928251885/US-Beef_Markey-Study_Apr-2017_Final.pdfGoogle Scholar
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University of Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station. “Market Classes and Grades of Meat.” By Louis D. Hall. Bulletin no. 147, 1910.Google Scholar
University of Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station. “Historical Development of Beef Quality and Grading Standards.” By Elmer Kiehl and V. James Rhodes. Research Bulletin no. 728, 1960.Google Scholar
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