The animals are rounded up and herded into a “backgrounding” pen, where they’ll spend a couple of months before boarding the truck for Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: The animals are, for the first time in their lives, confined to a pen, “bunk broken”—taught to eat from a trough—and gradually accustomed to eating what is for them a new and unnatural diet. Here is where the rumen first encounters corn.
