RKANSAS CITY, Kansas, April 14 � It isn't losing the
Japanese market for filet mignon that bothers Bill Fielding most. It's
losing the market for tongue.
Until a case of mad cow disease was found in the United States on Dec.
23, a tongue from his premium cattle fetched $17 in Japan. American
wholesalers pay $3.50.
Asian buyers also paid more for the company's prime beef, but the real
money was in the spare parts, said Mr. Fielding, chief operating officer
at Creekstone Farms, a high-end beef producer with an ultramodern plant
here in the flat Kansas corn belt. Mexico snapped up his stomachs and
Russians paid 30 cents a pound for liver that goes for 8 cents
domestically.
But after Dec. 23, foreign countries shut their doors. Creekstone lost
25 percent of its sales, laid off 45 of its 750 workers and idled its
plant one to two days a week.
Japanese buyers assured Mr. Fielding that they would buy again if he
tested his beef for the disease, formally known as bovine spongiform
encephalopathy.
In response, he built a laboratory five feet from the overhead chain
that carries skinned heads through the plant. His staff was trained in
testing for mad cow, using a machine that gives results in seven hours,
while the carcasses are still in the cooler.
But on April 9, the United States
Department of Agriculture forbade Creekstone to test its cattle, saying
there was "no scientific justification" for testing young steers like
those Creekstone sells. Certifying some beef for Japan as disease-free,
the department said, might confuse American consumers into thinking that
untested beef was not safe.
Calling those arguments "ludicrous," Mr. Fielding has threatened to
sue. He says he only wants the freedom to please a big, fussy customer,
and he accuses the department of bending to the will of the big meat
companies that control 80 percent of the industry.
[A department spokesman said no official could individually discuss Mr.
Fielding's accusations. But in a telephone news conference on Friday, Dr.
Ron DeHaven, the new chief of the department's health inspection service,
reiterated that he wanted to "focus our resources on a science-based
plan," which in the long run, he said, would be better for exports.]
Mr. Fielding, 57, spent 25 years running divisions of three meatpacking
giants, Cargill, ConAgra and Farmland Industries, and is a former chairman
of the American Meat Institute, the slaughterhouse industry's trade group.
"So I understand big packers," he said. "They're exerting all the pressure
they can."
Creekstone slaughters 1,000 cattle a day. Mr. Fielding estimates that
exporting the premium meat, along with tongues and other offal, brought in
$220 per steer. Giving up that revenue because it is not allowed to do a
test that costs $20 a head "comes out to $200,000 a day that we don't
capture," he said. "Our long-term viability is very much at risk."
In Japan recently, he saw free samples
of Australian "B.S.E.-free" beef in stores that once sold his. "That just
kills me," he said.
The giants use slaughterhouses that can kill 400 cattle an hour but
work on thin profit margins, he said. They do not want to build
laboratories, train technicians, slow down cutting lines to take brain
samples or build more cold-storage space. Pork and chicken profits will
see them through the crisis and they would be happy, he argued, to see a
troublesome competitor close.
J. Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, which
represents slaughterhouses large and small, said in a written statement
that his group "did not urge U.S.D.A. to respond negatively or positively
to the Creekstone request."
Top officials of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which
represents 27,000 cattle ranchers, argued strongly in an interview that
Creekstone should be stopped. Testing young animals, said Jan Lyons, the
group's president, "is like testing kindergartners for Alzheimer's."
Terry Stokes, the chief executive, said, "If you let one company step out and do that, other companies
would have to follow," at considerable expense.
Mr. Fielding also argued that the decision contradicted a recent one on
organic meat.
For nearly a decade, the department and big beef producers said in
unison that the Europeans, who bar beef raised with hormones or
antibiotics, were just being protectionist. American beef, they said, was
perfectly safe but consumers would be confused if some was certified as
hormone-free. Then, in 2002, the department reversed itself and began
certifying organic beef.
Gary Weber, vice president for regulatory affairs at the cattlemen's
association, said the difference was that organic beef producers were not
legally allowed to imply that their beef was safer.
Creekstone Farms specializes in black Angus beef, and ships semen from
its prize bulls in Kentucky to ranchers it buys from.
Its $200 million plant has what Mr. Fielding said were the nation's
only indoor pens. Fans keep cattle from smelling blood, and they are urged
forward to slaughter by long paddles, not electric prods. The
plastic-coated sides of the "kill box" move in to hug them, so they do not
collapse as a bolt is shot into their skulls.
Humane treatment of doomed animals may be an oxymoron, but it keeps the
steaks tender.
"If you know you're going to be zapped, you tense up," Mr. Fielding
explained. "It changes the quality of the meat."
Workers still on the line at the four-year-old plant are worried about
their jobs.
"We always get fewer hours from Thanksgiving on because people are
eating turkey and ham," said Alva Garcia, 38, who folds boxes for boxed
beef. "After New Year's, it usually picks up. This year, it didn't."
She lost her house when her previous employer, another meatpacking
company, closed. "A lot of people gave up their homes, their cars, or
moved to other states to look for work," she said.
Support for Creekstone is emerging from some Kansas Congressional
representatives, state agricultural officials and small cattle ranchers.
On Wednesday, former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, who is married to
Howard Baker, the ambassador to Japan, backed the company in a letter to
Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman. Ms. Veneman, a former food-industry
lobbyist, has exchanged increasingly tense letters with Japanese
agriculture officials, who expressed disappointment at her Creekstone
decision.
Particularly galling to Mr. Fielding is this: In Japan, because of the
shortage, Australian producers are getting up to $42 a
tongue.
