This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Matthew Moore. Joining us in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio Two is our pal Jared Phillips to talk Ozarks history with us once again.
Matthew Moore: Jared, welcome back.
Jared Phillips: Hey, glad to be here.
Moore: We are talking about something that affects a lot of us, probably in a lot of different ways. We're talking about cows today.
Phillips: Cows. Yeah. Like a lot of my neighbors, I started cutting hay in the last few days, and as you do when you cut hay, you turn in circles a lot and you have a lot of time to think. And so I got to thinking about cows. If people have been paying attention, cattle and the cattle market has been a big deal, at least for those of us that kind of watch the ag markets. When we think about inflation at the grocery store and a few other things, beef is one of these things that comes up a lot. And so I got to thinking, well, what's the story of beef in the Ozarks?
Moore: Maybe this is just the naivete of me, but when I think of cattle, I often think of dairy. And I also think specifically — this is just a personal disclosure here — my in-laws are part of the Highland Dairy Coleman Dairy farm industry down in central Arkansas. But when you're talking about cattle here specifically, you're talking about the meat production side of it.
Phillips: Yeah. So the Ozarks are like a lot of places in the country where we had, for a long time, a sort of healthy dairy industry. No dairy industry has ever been totally healthy. But when you drive around on the backroads or even the main roads in Arkansas, if you see what looks like an old farm and there's a smallish brick building, usually painted white, that's an old dairy barn. It would accommodate anywhere from six to 16 cows, depending on the size of the dairy operation. But the heyday of dairy has long since passed us by. As of a couple of years ago, 99.9% of the dairies in Arkansas, much less the Ozarks, have closed. And so the majority of the cattle conversation in the Ozarks from before the Civil War has always been, what do we do with beef cows? How do we think about beef cows?
Moore: So maybe for those of us who don't know the difference, what's the difference between a dairy cow and a cow that's used for beef?
Phillips: So you can use all cows for beef, but you can't necessarily use all cows for dairy. And really what we think about in terms of modern beef and dairy production, we're just talking about how over the last 150 years we've selectively bred certain breeds to be really good at one thing or really good at another thing. Dairy breeds — so you think about your classic Holstein cow, that black and white cow — they're bred to give a whole lot of milk every day. And beef cattle, when we pay attention to beef cows, we'll ask the question, is that mother a good milker? But we don't mean is she a good dairy cow? We just mean does she produce a good amount of milk for her calf. Their frames are different. The way they produce milk is different. What their target audience is is kind of different.
Moore: So when we think about beef production in the Ozarks, how does it look different — how does it look the same — as, say, the upper Midwest, where we tend to think of beef production?
Phillips: To answer that, we really have to go back before the Civil War. In the Ozarks, when white settlers started to show up in numbers — so between 1810 and 1840 — we did not consume cows as a form of protein. Homesteaders, especially as things got established, started to have their own home dairy cow, but not really for sale in the market like you think about a dairy operation today. Cattle, when we saw them, we saw them for two reasons. They were draft animals — they would plow and pull things, very important all the way through the Civil War. And then we would have the open range. The majority of the Ozarks was an unfenced area, kind of like the Great Plains. The forests of the Ozarks, by the time we get to the 19th century, were what we call an oak savanna. So it wasn't this densely packed, tight brambly undergrowth that we think of today sometimes. It was big stretches of big stately oak trees and a lot of healthy grasses and river cane brakes on the rivers, really actually good for cattle to eat on. And so Ozarkers would throw a few cows out into the open range, and then once or twice a year they'd gather them up and see what's going on. And it was almost always for export. We would send our cattle out into other markets. Cattle are one of the very first ways we see concentrated effort to connect ourselves to the national and international markets. And so by the eve of the Civil War, 1860, we have more cattle per capita in the Ozarks than we do anywhere else in the country. By 1860, the Ozarks are producing cattle far and away above the national average — it's two thirds higher per capita than anywhere else in Arkansas in particular. Arkansas, Missouri and eastern Oklahoma were really heavy in the cows. Then, of course, the Civil War happens.
Moore: We talked about farming a bit last time. From an ecological or environmental standpoint, what makes the Ozarks suitable to have good beef farming?
Phillips: Well, initially, nothing, except for what I mentioned a minute ago — the oak savanna and the river cane brakes. When we think about cattle operations today, most people are probably thinking about, when they drive out on Highway 16 or 62 or whatever, a whole lot of black or red cows in a relatively contained pasture. This is not what cattle farming looked like before the Civil War, and even through the rest of the 19th century.
What cattle farming looked like then was relatively low numbers per farm, but lots of farms. The number of farms over the last 150 years has dramatically reduced, and the number of cows has dramatically increased, not just per farm but in general across the region. A farm would have anywhere from two to ten cattle and they would be free ranged. For the most part, cattle are moving through the woods. But we're going to see instances where farmers understand the impact that cattle are having on this open range. Haymaking is a really laborious process, especially in the 19th century, and so they relied on river cane stands. If you've ever driven along the Illinois or the Buffalo River or the White, and you see those big stands of what looks like sugar cane or bamboo, it's river cane. It's native to the area, and it will stay green throughout most of the winter and provides good forage. So deer are eating it, and before a lot of white settlers, bison are eating it. It's a really good forage to sustain an animal over the wintertime. And so the early farmers figured out a sort of commons management system to ensure they're not using too much of the river cane at any one time.
But then, as we're more tapped into the market coming into the Civil War, beef prices — kind of like we see right now, beef prices are at a historic high, probably the highest they've been since the 1960s — so beef prices are jumping and it's really hard for farmers to get involved in farming. But those that are are really interested in further capitalizing on that market. And then the Civil War disrupts everything. Not only do we have the chaos of the war — and while we don't have Gettysburg, we have things like Pea Ridge and Wilson's Creek and Prairie Grove — but we're going to see a massive confiscation of livestock across the Ozark Highlands. Something like 20 to 30% of all the livestock in the region are going to be confiscated or stolen by either official Union or Confederate forces or the guerrillas that are running through the area.
Moore: So we look at cattle farms pre-Civil War. Let's think about post-Civil War. It sounds like there never really was a recovery from that, or certainly not to the scale that we saw before.
Phillips: What will happen is between the end of the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century, the national cattle conversation starts to change. By the end of the 19th century, like in a lot of areas in American life and really global life, we start to get really excited about this idea — we can know things, and if we know everything we can fix everything, kind of an old school Enlightenment idea. And this extends to cattle just as much as it extends to health care and public policy.
So we're going to start to see the opening of the breed books, which is a phrase we use in the livestock world. This is when livestock associations and big name breeders begin to really pay attention to the genetics of their herds. This is when we start to see people get really excited about the breed names — so Angus or Hereford or Charolais or Simmental, things like this. These kind of iconic breeds that, if you go and you talk to a friend of yours or a relative that's in the cattle industry and you start to mention some of these names, they're going to start to talk about one of their favorite cows from that line. So we formalize the industry. But when we do that, we start to see the introduction of a weakness in the cattle system — a genetic or a biological weakness. In places like the Ozarks and Appalachia, even in other areas in the plains and the West, where we're a lot slower to adopt these pedigreed herds or registered herds, we have what we call scrub cows. They're kind of like pound mutts, right? You go to the pound, you're going to get — they're all dogs, but they may not all be the same kind of dog or we don't even know what's going on. The same is kind of true in Ozark cattle, but they're tough. They're really tough cows and they're able to withstand a lot of environmental pressure.
This is really important because in 1906, we start to get some legislation around a tick-borne disease. Ticks are a problem for humans — everybody, especially this time of year, be mindful of your ticks. The same was true for cows. This particular disease was called Texas Fever — no shade against Texas, it's just where it was all sort of located. But if the cows didn't have an immunity to it, it would kill cows. It didn't necessarily cause any problems for humans, but it was a problem for cattle herds. So there's a quarantine line that establishes across much of the South where cows cannot travel north of this quarantine line, which just so happens to be roughly the Mason-Dixon line.
And that's a problem. All the Ozark cows and the Texas cows, they're all going to St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, the Great Lakes. And so there are USDA and state-level efforts to try to eradicate the tick disease, kill the ticks. And then the introduction of the breeding books and the rethinking of how we think about cattle pedigree, and also getting cows that are better at producing meat or better at producing milk — that breeding story we talked about a minute ago. This is going to lay the foundation for what we think of as a cattle operation today.
Moore: When we think about cattle operations today, I imagine it's much like any kind of farming — it's really hard to do it on a small scale and be able to sustain a livelihood from it. Are you seeing people who are doing it in the same way that maybe some people have a few chickens in their backyard for eggs? Is there a small-scale or family-size operation happening here in the Ozarks where they're not necessarily doing it as their profession, but doing it as a way to feed their families?
Phillips: Yeah. Since the end of the Second World War, we've really seen both styles of cattle operation emerge in the Ozarks. The old style would have been that smaller homestead, and then we've seen the growth of the larger commercial operations around it. What we do in the Ozarks since the Second World War is we feed the stockyard system. We do what's called cow-calf pair operations, and we're really, really good at it. By 1970, we have like 3.5 million cows across the Ozarks, broadly speaking. We're one of the best in the country at it — here I am throwing a little shade at Texas. We grow a better grass easily compared to other places. What we'll see happen is the growth of larger and larger cattle operations and also the growth and maintenance of small homestead-style ones. Cattle, like some poultry operations, allow you to recognize the limits of agriculture in the Ozarks, meaning it's been hard forever to make a full living off the land in the Ozarks. It's a hard country to do that in. So you can have an off-farm job and still run a cow herd. A lot of people across the region are going to have a relatively large cattle operation. A homesteading operation is anywhere between four to 15 mama cows. And then when you get into that 30 to 40 or more, you're starting to think about a commercial operation. Everybody, for the most part, is a part-time farmer in that sense. They have the cow herd and they have an off-farm job that lets them help pay the expenses because in a normal sequence of years, the cattle market is not as good as it is right now. You can sell cows into the market and make a little side money here and there, cover the cost of operation plus some. But today the cattle market is such that folks — small timers or big timers — are for the first time in a really long time doing okay on it.
Moore: Well, Jared, thank you as always for your time on this. I love learning new stuff with you every month.
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