Much like the other big C’s, the cattle industry has changed dramatically as technology and population growth have transformed the world — and much of Arizona’s landscape.
If you’re in Phoenix, driving east on Washington Street just past South 48th Street, you’ll find a little piece of history. It’s The Stockyards Restaurant, established in 1947.
Today, it’s sandwiched between the light rail, two freeways and the airport — but in the early 1900s, this area was home to about 40,000 head of cattle.
Gary Lasko is one of the restaurant's current owners.
“In 1919, the Tovrea family, which was a cattle baron family, established the first cattle pens on Washington,” Lasko said.
Edward A. Tovrea built and owned butcher shops throughout the state and he founded a meat packing company in Phoenix.
“There’d be lots of ranchers bringing their cattle in from the outlying areas like Casa Grande and a lot of ranchers that brought them into the stockyards, sold them here, then the Tovrea family would feed them here,” Lasko said. “The slaughterhouse was right over on 48th Street.”
There were about 200 acres of pens, and many people think it was the largest feedlot in the world.
“The business grew and grew until [in] 1947, they decided to build a small restaurant to feed all the cowboys working the stockyards,” Lasko said.
What started as a small cafe grew into a much larger restaurant that was rebuilt in 1953 after a major fire. The steakhouse has been largely unchanged since then. It still serves locally sourced beef and showcases the original murals and barstools, as well as historic photos.
Pointing to an old photo of a cowboy, Lasko said: “I did have a gentleman come in one day and say, 'that’s my dad right there,' and he told me where the picture was taken.”
Now, as one of the oldest steakhouses in the state, Lasko said it’s a shrine to Arizona’s cattle industry.
“We're doing everything we can to retain the history and the legacy of the restaurant and its connection to the cattle industry in the state of Arizona,” Lasko said.
Tovrea’s cattle were moved sometime around 1970 because Phoenix was becoming more urban and people were complaining about the smell. Nowadays, to find a big ranch, you have to make a drive out of Phoenix to somewhere more rural like Skull Valley, where Jim Webb keeps his herd.
“It’s been awfully dry and these calves aren’t as big as we would normally expect,” Webb said.
Webb is a fourth-generation cattle rancher with 33,000 acres of land in Skull Valley and a 16,000-acre ranch in Globe.
“We should have about 300 cows here and 300 cows there, but because of the dry times, we’re about half of that,” Webb said.
Less rainfall means less green feed for the cows to eat, so Webb has to supplement their diet.
“That blue bucket that says Vitalix on it, it's a molasses combination that's got a lot of energy in it,” Webb said.
He keeps heifers for about 10 to 15 years, and they give birth to a calf every year. When his father bought this property in 1951, their calves were sold locally. Now, they get loaded up in trucks and sold to pastures in Texas, California, or Colorado where they’ll feed until they’re big enough to go to a packing plant.
“They’ll be about a year and a half old by the time they get to that size,” Webb said.
Despite the drought cycle, he’s able to keep his animals healthier than the cows of the '50s.
“When my dad bought this ranch, you would only give them a little tetanus shot when you weaned them,” Webb said. “Today, we give them respiratory shots and help them to be very healthy.”
There have also been advances in genetic technology allowing ranchers to breed cows with certain traits like higher milk production or easy calving.
“When my great-grandfather came out, they weren't on a creek that ran or had a spring or whatever, they didn't have wells,” Webb said. “So today you drill a well and you can keep cattle scattered a lot better. It utilizes the country a lot more.”
That allows for more even grazing and builds soil health. But the land has faced other challenges like people recreating with ATVs and motorcycles.
On a statewide scale, the industry has grown tremendously and become more productive.
George Frisvold is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Arizona. He said agricultural census data shows that around the time the state was developing in the early 1900s, the state had 32,000 dairy cows. Now there are about 200,000.
“Those cows in 1920 produced 124 million pounds of milk,” Frisvold said. “Now they produce more than 4.8 billion pounds of milk. Cattle and calves slaughtered in 1920 was less than 10,000. Now it's more than half a million.”
And farmers are able to get more product from fewer cows.
“Milk produced per cow is like six times higher than it was in 1920,” Frisvold said.
There aren’t as many beef cows as there once were, but Frisvold said the amount of beef Arizona produces has remained fairly steady thanks to advances in breeding, veterinary medicine and nutrition.
“Larger operations have computerized feed delivery,” Frisvold said. “So the animals are getting the right mix of nutrients at the right time. And that's computer-controlled. And there's even computerized milking machines.”
In some ways, Arizona’s cattle industry looks the same as it did 100 years ago: It remains a big part of the state’s cultural identity — and you can still find cowboys gathering their animals on horseback on large, sprawling ranches.
But they might have smartphones in their pockets with digital tracking or virtual fencing and the cows have better genetics, producing more consistent, higher quality beef than ever before.
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The “five C’s” — cattle, citrus, copper, cotton and climate — are a snapshot of Arizona history. While they aren't the main sectors of the state’s economy today, they speak to a time when Arizona came into its own, and for that, they will always matter. -
KJZZ examines the storied history of the state’s five C’s — copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate — and the role they still play in modern-day Arizona. -
KJZZ examines the storied history of the state’s five C’s — copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate — and the role they still play in modern-day Arizona. -
KJZZ examines the storied history of the state’s five C’s — copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate — and the role they still play in modern-day Arizona. -
KJZZ examines the storied history of the state’s five C’s — copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate — and the role they still play in modern-day Arizona.
