Another great review. I didn't realize the consolidation was happening already in the 1830's. I'm also surprised at the overall low numbers for those towns. Our little local two man slaughterhouse, working probably not much differently than in the 1830's (scalding and dehairing with shovels), kills 130 hogs per week or about six thousand per year. Also, moving your corn to market via pigs and cattle is a lot more efficient when you consider transportation costs for bulk corn.
Me too. I guess at one point the relative costs of moving live hogs or pork got out of balance to disfavor consumer adjacent packing. Available labor might have played a roll as well. It could also be that the consolidated packers worked out how to get the regulators to shut down the smaller players with more onerous regulations. The clamor over The Jungle would not have helped. It's ironic. I'm sure that Jurgis and Ona would have had a better shot at making it in one of the smaller towns.
Also the development of refrigerated "reefer" rail cars helped, especially once American tastes shifted from pork to beef. And labor probably was a factor in the shift from seasonal to year-round meat processing. But yes, the 1906 legislation was a huge subsidy to centralized packers like Swift and Armour.
I thought so....
Another great review. I didn't realize the consolidation was happening already in the 1830's. I'm also surprised at the overall low numbers for those towns. Our little local two man slaughterhouse, working probably not much differently than in the 1830's (scalding and dehairing with shovels), kills 130 hogs per week or about six thousand per year. Also, moving your corn to market via pigs and cattle is a lot more efficient when you consider transportation costs for bulk corn.
I was surprised that the initial consolidation didn't put the local and regional folks out of business. That's the way the story was usually told.
Me too. I guess at one point the relative costs of moving live hogs or pork got out of balance to disfavor consumer adjacent packing. Available labor might have played a roll as well. It could also be that the consolidated packers worked out how to get the regulators to shut down the smaller players with more onerous regulations. The clamor over The Jungle would not have helped. It's ironic. I'm sure that Jurgis and Ona would have had a better shot at making it in one of the smaller towns.
Also the development of refrigerated "reefer" rail cars helped, especially once American tastes shifted from pork to beef. And labor probably was a factor in the shift from seasonal to year-round meat processing. But yes, the 1906 legislation was a huge subsidy to centralized packers like Swift and Armour.
Was this the kind of packing that gave Green Bay, Wisconsin's NFL team their name?
As soon as you brought up Cincinnati, I remembered Les Nessman from "WKRP", since agriculture was his main beat as a reporter.
Yes, the Green Bay packers were meat packers. And Cincinnati's nickname in the first half-century of its existence was "Porkopolis".