This was the condition of the livestock business in the “good old days” before the establishing of the great packing centers; before the development of economical systems of slaughtering, saving the waste, and distributing dressed beef quickly and continuously to the remotest parts of the country.
No stockman now considers the demand of the local butcher as a serious factor in making or breaking the market for his cattle. If he is feeding a carload or more, he has an approximate date set for the finishing of his feed. By keeping in close touch with the supply of cattle in the country, their movement and the trend of prices, he chooses what appears to be the most favorable day and ships them to the market.
Even if he is feeding only a few head, the disposal of them is not dependent upon local demand. He may double-up with his neighbors to make up a car. He may belong to a shipping association that makes a business of collecting small lots into carloads for direct shipment, and although he sells to the local stock buyer, his knowledge of what his cattle are worth at the central markets enables him to secure a fair price.
So it has come about that world demand determines prices and governs buying activities in every town and village where livestock is purchased. For local butchers everywhere are governed by prices at the central markets. The truth is that the most successful butchers no longer do their own killing, but buy their beef from packers’ branch houses in the larger cities and towns or from “route cars” running from packing plants or branch houses into the smaller communities.
In doing this they get better beef at lower cost than by local slaughtering, and they can serve their customers with a safer and more satisfactory article because the animal is killed and the meat prepared under the stringent government inspection and sanitary regulations that are practiced only in the larger establishments. This insures absolute freedom from diseased conditions and careless handling.
Practical butchers, who are also feeders, have proved by test that they can ship their beef cattle hundreds of miles to the big packer, have them slaughtered, dressed and returned at less cost than they can do their own killing. This is possible because the utilization of every scrap of the animals in valuable by-products, and the saving in labor by wholesale slaughtering and handling, pay all expenses, including the freight both ways, and leave a margin for the butcher besides.
The local butcher or livestock producer can little better afford to kill and prepare his own beef than he can afford to tan the hide and make his own shoes. There was a time, even in America, when the farmer himself actually did these things. He also sheared his own sheep by hand, while his wife and daughters spun the wool into yarn and wove cloth for the family clothing. Progress has made such methods absurd, unprofitable and impracticable.
But the great machinery of economical production and distribution was not built in a day, or a year, or a decade. Armour and Company’s activities began more than fifty years ago. At first the packing house was only a butcher shop on an enlarged scale, preparing and handling pork products almost exclusively. Cattle were killed for local consumption only, as there was no such thing as cold storage, refrigerator car lines or branch houses for the distribution of fresh meats.
In those days the offal from the packing houses was thrown away or buried, as is still done to considerable extent by the small butcher at the present time. The by-products industries, by which hundreds of valuable articles are now created from what was once waste, were developed through long years of scientific investigation and experimentation.
The efficiency of the Armour organization of today is the result of the accumulated efforts of thousands of trained scientific and business minds, applied through half a century to the solution of the problem of factoring and furnishing food supplies for the nation and the world by the most direct and efficient means.