Globalization, industrialization, and monopoly power have mined our most precious resources.
See the following presentation by clicking the arrows in the top left of the image:
When Globalization and the Game of Monopoly is Over
As the U.S. economy reels from the impacts of tariffs, and cattle and beef supplies run short, we should go back and try to understand how we got here. How a handful of corporations leveraged Canadian and U.S. producers against one another to profit and capture our food supply.
The picture above is from a 2003 presentation at the Tiffin Center in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. As you can see from the following presentation, there was push back to the growing corporate concentration, but only by a few, mostly ignored voices.
The two biggest cattle feeders in Canada were in the audience that winter day. Although highly subsidized, many of the best and most efficient Canadian feeders were driven out of business by the meatpacking cartel – IBP (now Tyson), ConAgra (now JBS), and Cargill, the same market predators cooperating in the demise of our U.S. cattle industry.
Montana cowboy and cartoonist, Wally Badgett, captured the reality.
See the following for the full 2003 presentation:
Alberta Ag Tiffin Conference Lethbridge, Alberta
There’s a lot of talk about rebuilding local/regional food systems, sustainability, and regenerative practices, but it’s all talk until we restore farm gate income to a level that allows people to return to the land with a quality of life that makes them want to stay.
The big ag and food monopolies have zero intention of giving up their unfair share of the food dollar, so let’s go around these greedy and powerful middlemen and build thriving rural communities and healthy urban centers.
PINA Building Local Regional Food Systems Colorado Springs
2016 – Becky Elder introduces me to PINA:
Notes: Click on this link for slide 26, the video in the Dr. Heffernan slide: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2UQsw_qdy8s
Other references:
Vicious Circles – Big meat packers continue to suck the blood out of cattle industry
Emptiness: https://nobull.mikecallicrate.com/2010/08/02/history-repeated/
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-07-02/jbs-brazilian-butchers-took-over-the-world
https://apnews.com/article/d6dcbfa7ebcb4842b9ad49e44615c5e0
Texas A&M, and Other Land-Grant Economists, Lead Effort to End Competitive Livestock Markets
The Antitrust Revolution, by Barry Lynn: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/10/the-antitrust-revolution-big-tech-barry-c-lynn/
Boxed beef was a bad idea: https://nobull.mikecallicrate.com/2024/01/22/return-to-carcass-trade-is-essential-for-cattle-industry-and-rural-prosperity/
McDonald’s is suing Tyson Foods for allegedly choking the supply chain to raise prices
“The money and political power of Wall Street has stolen America’s food system, bankrupted our farmers and ranchers, mined our soils, polluted our environment, wasted our precious water, and left us with expensive industrially produced food that makes us sick.” – Occupy Wall Street Food Day, December 2011
Industrial Agriculture and Urban Sprawl – A model of growth that’s made to fail.
Ranching Reboot Episode 4, Mike Callicrate “It’s time for a third revolution against monopolies”
Above: Ranching Reboot – Episode 4 – Mike Callicrate, owner of Ranch Foods Direct, sat down with us to talk about all manner of things from cattle markets, to public food spaces, the Bander, his feedlot and the pathway he built to market.
He shares valuable lessons learned from fighting against the commodity production system and how he’s built his own pathway to the consumer.
We talk about small community slaughter plants and public meat spaces and what that could look like going in to the future. We discuss environmental challenges, the food police and what it means when a Dollar General comes to town.
