Tough stock: squeezed by Japan's beef ban, consolidation and other market forces, Colorado ranchers struggle--and adapt--to save their generations-old livelihood.

• Author: Buchsbaum, Lee

IT WAS ABOUT MIDNIGHT when Abby Hutchinson left the bar in Salida to go check on newborn cattle. It's calving season now, and they're coming any time. Abby does this almost every night, though generally not after leaving a bar. Routinely, she leaves from her home and drives through the dark rolling pasture along the Little Arkansas River inspecting the herd with a powerful flashlight looking for problems, or in this case, additions. "There's one that needs to be tagged," she says suddenly, and she stops the truck to get a better look. Peering out of the darkness is a fragile, wobbly calf, maybe one hour into this world.

While Abby, her grandfather, Wendell, and Wendell's parents before him, all maintained this nightly routine through several generations going back to the 1870s, this young animal's value and future are tied to much different market forces than the calves spotted by Abby's forebears. While still placing a premium on high quality beef, market pressures are squeezing both the producers and the suppliers of packaged meats, limiting profits and forcing many of Colorado's ranchers to re-evaluate traditional practices.

"Ranchers make most of their money selling young calves," Wendell Hutchinson said of modern cattle ranching. "We're just a start really. We raise the calves, and sell them when they are 6 or 7 months old, and then they go to the bigger feedlots." The consolidated power of the nation's big three beef processors, one of which is Swift & Co. in Greeley, Hutchinson said, "keeps the price down on what we get."

Yet in 2003-2004, Colorado cash receipts from cattle increased 14 percent from $2.9 billion to $3.3 billion, according to the state field office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Those sales figures will most likely go up again this year as cattle auction prices are up from $104 per hundred pounds (cwt) to $110/cwt for cows, steers and heifers, and from $126/cwt to $136/cwt for calves.

Still higher prices might not be enough to sustain cattle ranching in Colorado, which remains under tremendous economic pressure, from forces ranging from the closing of the Japanese export market to U.S. beef products, other global competition, and consolidation within the meat-packing industry, to the effects of a withering 10-year drought that may not be over, rising grazing-land values that tempt many ranchers to sell out, and changing human diets.

Colorado is the nation's 10th largest cattle producer with a herd size statewide of more than 2.65 million head. The $2.5 billion industry in Colorado, the value of which ranks it fourth nationwide, represents well over half of the state's total farm income. The state also is a leader in beef processing, with several of the largest slaughterhouses and feedlots in the country located in Greeley.

That industry has consolidated down to three leading producers, Tyson, Cargill/Excel and Swift & Co, which is headquartered in Greeley. Swift, which is the former ConAgra and Mon-fort meat-packing operations, is the third largest beef-and-pork processing company in the United States, but because of other large global operations and its market position in Australia, the company is actually also the second-largest cattle processor worldwide. With net sales in fiscal year 2005 of more than $9.7 billion, Swift is the nation's 15th largest private company, employing 20,000 globally and 2,500 in Colorado (500 in its Greeley headquarters offices, and another 2,000 at its processing plants). It is Colorado's largest private company.

And the heart of Swift's business is U.S. beef. A large portion of that, 16 percent, used to be exported. Since...