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“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
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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.
- This Cattleman's Got A Beef
Photo: Sean Cayton - 2003People producing good food from happy animals, while improving the environment, shouldn’t have to fear the government.
Photo above featured in a 2003 article: This cattleman's got a beef, Mike Callicrate and Ranch Foods Direct take on the big meat packersby Kathryn Eastburn Categories
Food Policy & Law
E. Coli Confessions Part I
by John Munsell | Oct 11, 2011
Opinion
Editor's Note: This is the first part in a series written by John Munsell of Miles City, MT, who explains how the small meat plant his family owned for 59 years ran afoul of USDA's meat inspection program. The events he writes about began a decade ago, but remain relevant today.
They say that confession is good for the soul. I've been involved in a series of ugly events since my plant in 2002 recalled 270 pounds of ground beef contaminated with E.coli O157:H7 and now want to admit the embarrassing truth for public review. moreTags
- advanced meat recovery
- antibiotics
- beef checkoff
- Big Food
- BPI
- Callicrate
- Callicrate Beef
- Callicrate Cattle Co.
- Cargill
- Chipotle
- Colorado Springs
- COOL
- Dudley Butler
- e. coli
- Eric Schlosser
- fast food nation
- food Inc.
- Foodopoly
- GIPSA
- HSUS
- IBP
- Industrial Agriculture
- JBS
- McDonald's
- meat packers
- Mike Callicrate
- Monsanto
- NCBA
- OCM
- Organization for Competitive Markets
- pink slime
- R-CALF
- Ranch Foods Direct
- Rick Hughes
- Smithfield
- Sodexo
- steroids
- Sysco
- Tom Vilsack
- Tyson
- U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance
- USDA
- Vandana Shiva
- Walmart
- zilmax
National News Supplement
Message to MAHA: When Globalization and the Monopoly Game are Over …
Corporate Controlled Globalization – Early Warnings to U.S. and Canadian Producers
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.
“Professional management and efficiency can be instruments to impoverish communities or they can be instruments to enrich communities…The Priority of People Over Capital.” – Greg MacLeod
See the following for the full 2003 presentation:
Alberta Ag Tiffin Conference Lethbridge, AlbertaFast Food Nation To Barons – What Happened to the U.S. Food System?
How a nation, once able to feed itself and others, lost its food system and became dependent on imported food …
Building a truly permanent and sustainable food system
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:
They Really Are Gangsters, Thugs, and Thieves
Ranchers struggling to survive deserve to know what happened to their markets, and who is complicit in the destruction of agriculture’s largest industry. We all have a stake in this.
Independent Beef Association of North Dakota sept 2024 blog version updatedUse arrows at the top of slide to advance through the presentation.
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