Mike Callicrate | No-Bull Food News

The world is running out of fresh water. The new documentary, DAY ZERO, is raising the alarm. The day when the water runs out is coming soon, especially to places like Colorado and the High Plains.

Humanity is rapidly consuming Earth’s fresh water supplies while removing nature’s ability to replenish them. Explore the journey to when Earth’s fresh water supplies will exhaust in service to modern comforts.

See trailer: DAY ZERO

The Arkansas and South Platte rivers that flow from the snow-packed Colorado Rockies to the High Plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas are drying up. Growing cities like Colorado Springs and Denver are consuming more water, depleting two of the traditional sources of recharge for the Ogallala Aquifer. After transferring water north to a sprawling Colorado Springs, the Arkansas river is providing less and less water for growing food in the fertile fields of Southern Colorado, and barely, if at all, makes it to the Kansas border. At times, the South Platte water levels are nearly undetectable from an altitude of 8,500 feet at the Northeastern border of the state where the river once had a healthy flow into Nebraska.

“There was enough water to submerge the entire state of Colorado to a depth of forty-five feet, they called it the Ogallala Aquifer. Almost a third of the Ogallala water is already gone. Most of what’s left will disappear in the space of a lifetime.” –DAY ZERO

Over 130,000 head of cattle fill the Yuma County, Colorado feedlot, destined to JBS, the biggest meatpacker in the world.

“It’s not what the cattle are drinking, it’s what the crops are consuming in the production of corn and alfalfa hay.” – DAY ZERO

The precious Ogallala Aquifer water is free for the production of subsidized commodity crops that are sold at below cost of production prices to global corporations. When the water is gone, the companies will leave.

“The industrial model will fail because it’s not sustainable.” – DAY ZERO

When the water, the life blood of our existence, is gone, the big food corporations and promoters of urban sprawl will go somewhere else, leaving impoverished and hungry communities behind.

There are solutions

What if the extractive big food monopolies could be broken up, allowing rural economies to thrive, inviting people back from overcrowded urban areas to be part of a new healthier, more sustainable, and resilient food system.

What if safe pathways from the producer to consumer could be restored? What if smaller, safer, and more efficient local/regional meat processors, like we had fifty years ago, could return? Advantages of small rural slaughter plants, like Callicrate Cattle Company, include more efficient use of water, using and recycling thirty to fifty gallons per head, compared to over 700 gallons per head in the big plants.

Downsize, diversify, and sell direct – Feed People instead of corporations.

What if, given a fair share of the food dollar and living incomes, family farms and ranches could become the husbandmen and land stewards they were meant to be?

What if barley was a USDA program crop, encouraging more farmers to grow it? Livestock finish very well on barley, and like wheat, barley is typically a dry-land crop that doesn’t require aquifer depleting irrigation.

Ask President Biden and your elected officials to help lead the effort in building new and better local/regional food systems that will serve our existing and future generations.

Also see the 2009 article from the Scientific American: The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source

Vice: Meathooked and End of Water

A-PLUS legislation allowing auction markets to invest in and/or own slaughter plants is a step backwards in local/regional food system development.

April 11, 2022

Gilles Stockton, President of Montana Cattlemen’s Association

It is not surprising that the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) is promoting another bad idea, but it is disheartening that the United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) and the Livestock Marketing Association (LMA) are going along with the Amplifying Processing of Livestock in the United States Act (A-PLUS).  This Act, sponsored by Representatives Jimmy Panetta and Vicky Hartzier, would allow livestock market owners to invest in, and/or own packing plants, which is an obvious conflict of interest.  Who will the auction market work for – you or the owner?

The genius of the Packers and Stockyards Act (P&S Act) is that it prohibited packing firms from owning cattle markets and stockyard owners from owning packing plants. In the days before 1921, the five dominate packers owned the railroad loading yards, the livestock cars, and the terminal market places.  This ownership of the vital market infrastructure allowed for the packers to have an unpriced captive supply.  Once a livestock producer committed their cattle or hogs to a packer, they were captive to whatever that packer decided to pay.

“An independent start-up packer, even one as large as the A-PLUS Act envisions, will not be able to get their product in front of the consumers.”

Rather than break up the packer cartel, the lawmakers in 1921 relied on free enterprise to restore a fair and competitive market.  They did this by requiring that the packers divest of the market infrastructure that they owned and controlled – the rail yards, the livestock cars, and the terminal markets. The packers were obligated to buy cattle and hogs at independent auction markets. This allowed for smaller regional packing concerns to competitively bid for cattle and hogs. And it worked, because by the 1970s the four largest packers controlled only a quarter of the market.

Our current market problems began in the 1980s when our government arbitrarily changed the policy and essentially negated any antitrust enforcement. This included enforcing the P&S Act. Since 1980, the dominate packers merged with one another and quickly came to monopolize the cattle and hog industries.  At the same time, the growth and consolidation of supermarket chains conspired to eliminate smaller regional packers. The Supermarkets preferred to buy through the centralized national system that the packer cartel provided.

“The solution is to restore the requirement that packers purchase in a market forum that they do not own and control.”

Over the past forty years, packers stopped using the public market in favor of captive supply arrangements where the cattle are not priced until delivery. The final price for most cattle and all hogs is now based on a very thin spot market. If a cattle feeder does not commit to this captive supply arrangement, they risk not having their cattle processed in a timely manner. The solution is to restore the requirement that packers purchase in a market forum that they do not own and control. The A-PLUS proposal goes in the exact wrong direction.

It is hard to know just who is pushing this crazy bad bill but it is obviously being advanced for the benefit of just a few, not independent livestock producers.  The press release from the NCBA announcing the A-PLUS Act pretends that it is a matter of principal, helping to promote more packing capacity.  A more likely possibility, is that certain parties are looking to cash in on the $500 million stimulus program earmarked for building moderate sized packing plants. This is certainly what happened with the Trump Administration’s stimulus plan, where big corporations and grifters got away with truckloads of money.

“The probable outcome of this whole scheme is that after these independent packers go out of business; the big packers will be able to buy brand new state of the art slaughter facilities for pennies on the dollar.”

The claim that the intention of A-PLUSE is to build small facilities is ludicrous. This bill allows for investment in or construction of packing plants capable of processing 2000 head per day or 700,000 per year. This is not small. A plant that size would process 2.5% of the total annual steer and heifer slaughter or 10.5% of the total cull, bull, and dairy cow slaughter.  There is nothing modest about a plant that large.

What the Biden Administration apparently has not consider in proposing to use taxpayer’s money to subsidize the building of moderate size packing facilities, is how will these new concerns market the meat?  The existing packer cartel has all the supermarket meat cases obligated to themselves. An independent start-up packer, even one as large as the A-PLUS Act envisions, will not be able to get their product in front of the consumers.

This is assuming that these new packing plants can even buy fed cattle at a competitive price out from under the packer cartel.  The probable outcome of this whole scheme is that after these independent packers go out of business; the big packers will be able to buy brand new state of the art slaughter facilities for pennies on the dollar. Perhaps this is what the parties who are pushing the A-PLUS Bill are planning all along.

The A-PLUS Act is clearly a terrible idea. It moves the industry in the exact opposite direction than what is needed.  If independent cattle ranchers and feeders are to survive, we need Congress and the Administration to restore competition. The way to do this is to do what was done in 1921 – require that the packers actually bid for their cattle in an open, competitive, and transparent market.

If you agree that the A-PLUS Act is a failure, call Representative Jimmy Panetta (202 225-2861) and Representative Vicky Hartzier (202 225-2876) and give them a piece of your mind.

Gilles Stockton
Grass Range, Montana

At the Great Bend Farm show – Standing up for rural prosperity – Brian Hale, Darren Dale, James Fenoglio, Steve Stratford, Mike Callicrate, and Justin Harris

Thanks to show organizer, Darren Dale, for the invitation to present at the Great Bend Farm Show. It was a pleasure presenting with fellow Kansan Steve Stratford. Steve is a welcome voice of reason and truth, and powerful defender of fair cattle markets.

On the 250-mile drive from St. Francis to Great Bend, I was reminded of the amazing wealth creation capacity of Kansas, but also of how little of the wealth stays in the state. Across Western Kansas, the big corporate feedlots were full, while the lower cost, more efficient farmer feeder lots were empty or abandoned. Three Dollar stores — yes, three — were open for business across the road from the motel in Hoisington, while franchise and retail chain stores lined the east-west thoroughfare through Great Bend. Like the coal mining towns of Appalachia, Kansas creates the wealth, but keeps very little. How insulting is it for the farmers, ranchers, and workers of rural America, after seeing their communities decimated by corporate extraction, to be left with only Dollar stores hawking the leftovers of the wealth they created?

Following are the slides from my presentation at Great Bend.

Click on arrows in lower left corner of image to advance slides.

In 1985, Barbara W. Tuchman wrote the book, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to the people’s interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.

The growing dominance of the industrial food system since 1985 could easily add another, even more alarming, chapter to Tuchman’s book.

Will today’s extractive globalized model of agriculture be written into history as the biggest folly of all?

Day Zero is coming fast for many of us. Like the marinas on Lake Powell, farm fields, livestock wells, and communities above the Ogallala Aquifer are running out of water. I wish the disappearance in our underground aquifers was as visible as in the above ground structures like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Would we react differently?

“Aquifers belong to everyone, and especially to future generations.”

Quote from the December 2021 Atlantic article, The Next Disaster Coming to the Great Plains:

“When groundwater runs out, myths of growth and profit collapse into dust. Drying aquifers can result in starvation, migration, and violence. Or they can prompt us to rethink our relationship to one another and to the irreplaceable natural resources that we share. Aquifers belong to everyone, and especially to future generations.”

According to the producers, Day Zero should be releasing soon on Amazon Prime Video.

Fore more, see: The Current State of U.S. Agriculture and Food Infrastructure, and Solutions and VICE: Meathooked and End of Water

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, March 13, 2022

‘Broken systems raise costs far faster than resilient ones.’

Alan Guebert

One of the most beautiful–and inexplicable–aspects of economics is how its practitioners never seem to be wrong.

Indeed, almost every school of economic thought, from John Maynard Keynes’ demand-driven economics on the left to Arthur Laffer’s supply-side economics on the right, is crowded with disciples defending their leader’s theories and just often, if subtly, attacking their theological foes.

One such fistfight broke out in, of all places, the Feb. 28 editorial pages of the New York Times. In it, writer and editor David Dayen undressed one of the most famous economists of the last 40 years, Lawrence Summers, for his role in building one of the most efficiency-centered, imbalanced, and fragile economies in history.

“For decades, economists like Mr. Summers advanced policies like globalization, deregulation, and markets that valued efficiency over competition,” says Dayen. “They promised that these trends would deliver lower prices. And they did, for a time. But they also left the system vulnerable.”

Vulnerable to what we see today–broken global supply chains impossibly slow to repair; a domestic economy that, somehow, is both quickly growing and mired in inflation; and a consumer culture so treasured that we gladly trade regulation and competition for lower prices and higher economic growth.

It’s the manifestation of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s “marketized economy,” explains Dayen. “(T)he sole social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Cut regulations, cut taxes and allow companies to structure markets, people like Friedman maintained, and watch the economy take off.”

In short, markets are most important and government–regulation, taxes, antitrust–are far less important.

That’s been a solidly bipartisan tenet for 50 years. While Republican administrations–Reagan, Bush II, and Trump–cut taxes and nearly eliminated antitrust, Democratic administrations, especially Carter and Clinton, deregulated trucking, airlines, railroads, banking, and agriculture.

And most of this was accomplished by the early 2000s to lay the foundation for globalization–ever bigger free trade deals; the rapid rise of unregulated financial derivative markets; easy access to cheap, plentiful labor; and sophisticated, just-in-time supply chain management.

A Summers’ acolyte, Dayen reports, once likened it to how Walmart initially impacted the U.S. economy: The giant retailer might not have been good for local communities or local job markets, but there “is little dispute” Walmart’s cutthroat business model helped the other 120 million Americans not employed in local retail.

As such, “The trade-off was clear: sacrifice resiliency, wage security, and community for the promise of a five-dollar pack of tube socks.”

We may not like the comparison but we know it’s spot-on because, by golly, a pack of tube socks for $5–even if the socks were made by children working 70 hours a week in a pollution-riddled sweatshop–is still an easy, smart buy, right?

Until this year, when those socks–like our long-ordered television, new dishwasher, or car–were trapped somewhere in a global supply chain with too few manufacturers, too few shipping companies, too few ports, too few railroads, too few truck drivers, too few retailers, and too few solutions on how to fix the whole bloody mess.

American farmers and ranchers know the feeling. Two years ago a global pandemic, predicted though it was, fouled the food system because no one thought it could happen so no one had any plans for when it did happen.

And when it did happen, what was our first instinctive reaction? Give market giants like exporters and meatpackers even more market power; power it will take decades, if ever, to get back.

Today, war is ripping through integrated markets from Odessa to Omaha. No tax cuts, fewer environmental rules, more deregulation or less antitrust enforcement will lower crude oil prices or cut U.S. potash costs.

But none of this should be news because, as Dayen reminds us, “Broken systems raise costs far faster than resilient ones.”

America’s too few farmers and ranchers, too many broken rural communities, and too much cheap food are testament to that inarguable economic fact.

© 2022 ag

The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, supporting documents, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.com.