“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
January 15, 2021 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 63 • No. 1
The Conscience of the Cattle Industry Harvey Dietrich — 1934-2020 BY LEE PITTS
H
e was called “Hard Hearted Harvey” by fellow cattle traders but I came to know him as anything but. When the courageous cattleman, meatpacker, businessman and philanthropist Harvey Dietrich passed away from COVID on Christmas Eve the cattle industry lost its conscience.
Making A Name For Himself
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Although Harvey knew as much about a cow and what it took to turn a bovine into a beefsteak as much as anyone in history, he came into this life a city kid on November 16, 1934 born to Simon and Anne Dietrich near Boston, Massachusetts. The family lived there until Harvey was eight years old when Simon’s asthma issues forced the family to more hearthealthy climes, first to Phoenix and then to Los Angeles. Harvey’s father worked in the meat business in Boston and that is where he found work in Los Angeles. Harvey too entered the meat business at a tender age. In a story called ‘Arizona’s Last Jewish Cowboy’ in The Jewish News, Harvey recalled, “When I was 15 years old, a guy told my dad, ‘Send the kid down here and we’ll teach him to be a cattle buyer. I didn’t know a cow
from a dog. I was a city kid.” Imagine being picked up at 3 a.m. five days a week during the summer to work 13 hours a day at a meatpacking plant cleaning water troughs, feeding cattle and unpinning the shrouds from cow carcasses. And imagine loving every minute of it! So much so that he worked at the plant after school and during family vacations. No doubt this is where Harvey became the hard-driving, hard-working workaholic that he would be for the rest of his life. Harvey briefly attended Pierce Junior College in L.A. to appease his parents but that’s not where Harvey received his education... it was at the Globe meatpacking plant where he caught the eye of one of the owners, Lou Krassen. Even back then Harvey caught everyone’s eye. Gerald Timmerman, one of Harvey’s best friends and a fellow icon in the beef business, remembers his grandfather and father always referring to Harvey in a complimentary way, only it was in the meatpacker’s rough, sarcastic way of talking by always referring to him as that “@#$%^&* Harvey”. Geralds says, “For the longest time I thought Harvey was his last name!” Lou Krassen quickly saw Harvey’s potential, and started taking him on cattle buying trips and at the age of 19 Harvey became a full time cattle buyer with an independent Los Angeles packer. At 21 years of age Harvey and his first wife, Sheila, moved to Phoenix to replace a highly respected cattle buyer in Arizona who was retiring. Harvey was a natural and in 1963 took a new cattle-buying job with a L.A.-based company for double the salary and 10 percent of the profits. In 1967 alone, his bonus was $75,000! That’s when the “city kid” first started plunking down his own money to invest in the cattle business.
We Changed The Industry One of those investments was in SunLand Meat Packing Company. Gerald Timmerman recalls that the plant outside Phoenix in Tolleson, Arizona,
was built by Swift and it went through two ownership groups before a group that Harvey was a part of bought the plant. Shortly thereafter Ralph’s Grocery, with 165 stores primarily in Southern California, came to Harvey and said that too many of their customers were complaining that their beef was too tough. This was a common complaint back when ranchers were experimenting with 80 different breeds to get their cattle bigger and bigger. Not many people noticed that as the cattle got bigger their meat didn’t taste as good and as a result beef consumption in America plummeted by 20 pounds per person per year. One breed exec said that “buying a steak in a grocery store was like playing Russian Roulette, you had a one in six chance of getting a good one.” Under Harvey’s direction SunLand hired scientists to study the problem and they found that if Holstein-cross calves were kept in feedlots from birth and given high-energy feed the resulting meat was
far more tender than what was That doesn’t sound like any currently being produced by Hard-Hearted Harvey to me! the meatless wonders. It just so happened that at the time The Cattle, Not Chemicals LA Milk Shed was overflowing The next time I wrote about with Holsteins. It was proba- Harvey was after I’d written bly the largest concentration of a story about Dr. Ray Rodridairy cattle in the country and guez, another longtime friend Harvey estimated that 90 per- of mine who’d eaten at a steakcent of the cattle in Arizona and house and then became deathly Southern California were Hol- ill. His Doctor told Ray that it steins. By concentrating on ten- was because of the beta agoderness, SunLand Beef immedi- nists used in the cattle industry. ately began to sign agreements Beta agonists like ractopamine with cattle feeders and together are compounds that are fed to they produced a product called beef cattle and pigs to improve California Grown Beef that was weight gain, feed efficiency, and well received by the consumer. reduce carcass fat. But in the “”It had never been done be- process they tend to reduce fore, where a company that big marbling so steaks taste toughdepended on one supplier for er, are less juicy and less tender. beef,” said Harvey. “We changed This is not to mention what the the whole way you feed cattle. drugs were doing to the cattle. We changed the whole industry.” Comments from Professor TemWhen Harvey left SunLand ple Grandin and others then Beef in 1997, the company had surfaced in the Wall Street Jourgrown from 92 to 1,200 employ- nal, CNN, MSNBC and Fox ees and was conducting $500 outlets in which she said she’d million in sales annually. While observed heat stress, lameness, he worked at SunLand Beef, the hoof problems and aggressivecompany paid for 100 percent ness in feedlot cattle fed beta of his employees’ health-care benefits. continued on page two