THE GOLDEN CALF

NOT for years has beef been such a bargain. Housewives in New York last week were paying 50¢ or lower for choice sirloin in many a store, little more than half the price of a few years ago. One result was that consumers were tucking away more beef than ever. The U.S. will eat 82 lbs. per capita this year, a pound more than in 1955 and almost 50% more than just five years ago, when pork was king. Beef is not only the biggest single item on the U.S. food bill (17¢ out of every food $1) but it is also the largest single source of U.S. agricultural income. Farmers and ranchers grossed more from beef in 1955 than for their crops of wheat, cotton, rye and rice put together.

But last week, despite the peak popularity of their product, U.S. cattlemen were in the dumps. In the Kansas City stockyards, beef on the hoof sold for $14.50 a hundred pounds, near the lowest point in a decade and about 50% less than four years ago. Said Jay Taylor, past president of the American National Cattlemen's Association: "Plenty of cattlemen are going broke." Undoubtedly many ranchers who jumped in to make a quick killing when prices were sky-high were being hamstrung. But many veteran cowmen were still making money, although, as a group, ranchers were just about breaking even.

Market Stampede. Actually, the cattlemen had ambushed themselves. In 1951 and 1952, with ordinary beeves selling at an extraordinary $30 per 100 lbs. and choice bringing as high as $36, the cattlemen had gone to work to breed and feed cattle as never before, boosted the total number of beef cattle from 53 million in 1951 to 63 million in 1955. Last fall the market was stampeded by 50% more beef than five years ago. Inevitably, prices started to slide.

The low prices, however, are only a partial explanation for the great shift in eating habits that turned Americans from pork to beef eating (13.6 lbs. of beef for every eleven of pork). Another reason is the increasing efficiency of cattlemen at breeding and feeding, which has not only turned out beefier animals (in 100 years the average weight of a yearling has been doubled) but also tastier meat with more sirloin, chops and roasts and fewer poor cuts. What the U.S. wants in beef, the U.S. gets, thanks to the great progress in developing new and better breeds of cattle.

The U.S. cattle business started off with Christopher Columbus, who took hardy, long-horned Moorish stock from Spain's Andalusian plains and dropped them off in 1493 at Santo Domingo on his second voyage. From there they were taken to Mexico. Half a century later Coronado, bound north in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, drove 500 head across the Rio Grande for food along the way. Some escaped, and the famed longhorn found a home in Texas.

Bony, surefooted, able to withstand heat and live on prickly pear and little water, the longhorn was a perfect mate for the environment and multiplied on the wild ranges. By the time the Lone Star State won its independence, there were 80,000 longhorns in Texas, more critters than humans. Yet by 1920 the longhorn was almost extinct. It carried too much leg, flank and horn in proportion to edible beef, and cowmen simply could not afford to keep it.