Research Catalog

Cattle beet capital : making industrial agriculture in Northern Colorado

Title: Cattle beet capital : making industrial agriculture in Northern Colorado / Michael Weeks.
Author: Weeks, Michael (Historian)
Publication: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2022]

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HD9433.C6 W44 2022	Off-site

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Details

Description

xiii, 330 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

"Cattle Beet Capital explores the economic, cultural, and environmental processes and contingencies that shaped the evolution of industrial agriculture in northern Colorado"--
"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. "--

Alternative Title

Making industrial agriculture in Northern Colorado

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. -- Cultivating a Regional Agroecology -- 2. -- Capitalism and Sustainable Farming -- 3. -- Beet Biology and the Nature of Labor -- 4. -- Piedmont Sugar and the State of Science -- 5. -- The Economics of Mechanization and Watershed Engineering -- 6. -- Building the Petrochemical Paradigm -- 7. -- Manufacturing Beef.

ISBN

9781496208415
1496208412
9781496232304 (canceled/invalid)
9781496232311 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2022000527

OCLC

1263742592

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library