Mike Callicrate | No-Bull Food News

The Coronavirus has exposed the abject failures of a highly concentrated and centralized  industrial food system. Following is some history of how we got to this place that we can no longer feed ourselves.

Six years after the following 1990 LA Times article was written,  and after most of the competition in the meat industry was eliminated by IBP and the other major meatpackers, the confident IBP Chairman and CEO, Robert Peterson, proclaimed:

Eight years after Peterson’s bold statement, Tyson, the nation’s leading poultry company, purchased our nation’s largest beef packer and price leader, IBP. I explained the cattlemen’s lawsuit against IBP to John Tyson when we met at the 2002 NCBA convention. Mr. Tyson was there to announce that Big Chicken had just bought Big Beef!

Enter the criminal Batista brothers and JBS:

JBS Used Illegal Activity to Profit and Take Over the U.S. Beef Market

From a small butcher shop in Brazil, JBS has become the world’s largest meat processing company and a dominant force in America’s food industry, and much of its growth is the result of illegal activity.

JBS Bribed Brazilian Officials for Government-Backed Loans to Fuel Growth
In a decade-long scheme, the meat processor bribed more than 1,800 Brazilian politicians to secure Brazilian government development loans, which JBS admitted helped it take over the U.S. beef market. With these funds, JBS was able to acquire more than 40 rivals on four continents between 2007 and 2017.

JBS’ Owners Defrauded Four Brazilian Pension Funds Out of $2.5 Billion
The Batista family of Brazil owns JBS and several other Brazilian companies. The Batista brothers, Josely and Wesley, led a stock fraud scheme that defrauded four Brazilan pension funds out of $2.5 billion.

JBS Was Caught Bribing Meat Inspectors
In 2017, JBS was caught exporting rotten meat worldwide and trying to cover up the stench using cancer-causing acid products.

JBS Ripped off U.S. Cattle Farmers and Ranchers
In 2018, USDA found JBS had ripped off U.S. cattle producers at three separate slaughter facilities by shorting them on payments for their cattle. While the JBS abuses were extensive, USDA settled the claims for a mere $50,000 penalty.

Today, after thirty years of the big meatpackers manipulating the market and managing cattle prices at levels that producers could be conditioned to accept, over 40% of our ranchers are now out of business, replaced with cheap and dangerous imports. Two of our nation’s big-four meatpackers are Brazilian owned. The drastic price drop after the Tyson fire and another even worse crash after the Coronavirus, has finally awakened cattle producers, but so far, USDA continues to do nothing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t listen to the warning from 1990:

Meat Market Slaughter: Competition in meatpacking is dwindling as three big companies gain market share and power. Smaller competitors and state regulators are alarmed.

By MARIA L. La GANGA

April 22, 1990

12 AM

TIMES STAFF WRITER

By the end of the week, it was hard to deny that something was wrong in the meatpacking industry:

Monday, March 5: Specialty meat processor Doskocil Cos. of Hutchinson, Kan., filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. its major competitors–the so-called Big Three meatpackers–are all angling to snap up the company’s slaughtering facilities, a Doskocil spokesman said.

Thursday, March 8: Farmstead Foods of Albert Lea, Minn., announced the immediate closure and liquidation of plants in Albert Lea and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, throwing nearly 3,000 workers out of their jobs.

Friday, March 9: Oscar Mayer Foods Corp. announced that it would close its Vernon processing plant by the end of September, laying off nearly 550 employees, most of them older workers who had labored at the plant for more than a decade and who hadn’t had a pay raise since 1980.

The three companies reflect sweeping changes in the meatpacking industry–technological advances that make older plants obsolete, increased competition from meats such as chicken and consolidation of the industry–that make it increasingly difficult for smaller firms to compete with the Big Three meatpackers.

“The change in concentration in the beef-packing industries is just beyond any historical precedent,” said John M. Connor, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. “I think it’s just a matter of time before the Big Three beef packers learn to cooperate (with each other) rather than compete in the aggressive way they have been in the last three years.”

It’s also just a matter of time before pork processing becomes as concentrated as beef, according to agricultural economists and industry analysts. The watershed year for concentration in the beef industry was 1987; the 1990s could be that threshold time for pork.

Concentration–when a small number of companies control a large share of an industry–is far from merely an abstract concern. It affects workers, farmers, consumers, contends John Helmuth, assistant director of the Center for Agriculture and Rural Affairs at Iowa Sate University.

Because of concentration, “not only have meat prices gone up for consumers, but at the same time prices paid to (farmers) have gone down,” Helmuth said. “Wage rates have gone down. I think that what we’re seeing is that . . . (the big) meatpacking plants are able to keep more of their own profits.”

Concentration

The Big Three meatpackers–IBP Inc. of Dakota City, Neb., ConAgra Inc. of Omaha, Neb., and Excel Corp. of Wichita, Kan.–dispute such arguments, saying that concentration brings greater efficiency, higher prices to livestock suppliers and lower costs to consumers.

“Concentration is not unique to the meat industry,” said Gary Mickelson, spokesman for IBP. “Others have experienced similar changes. . . . The meat industry is responding to a changing market reality and increasing competition from other protein sources. It’s an extremely competitive industry. The companies that were paying the high wages are not there anymore.”

Today, the Big Three beef-packing firms have about 70% market share, and the top four pork-packing plants currently control about 40% of the pork we eat.

By May, the market share for the largest pork packers will increase again, as IBP opens a new pork-packing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, a facility that will be able to slaughter 15,000 hogs each day.

And as concentration intensifies, legislatures and advocacy groups around the country are gearing up to do battle with the Big Three:

* The attorneys general from five Midwestern states have asked the Justice Department to launch an antitrust investigation into the Big Three’s business practices. In an April 12 letter, the attorneys general from North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Montana said “there is growing concern over the continued competitive viability of this industry and the enhanced prospect of collusive anti-competitive activities taking place.”

* A handful of state governments are looking into legislation that will do what they contend federal laws have failed to accomplish–bring competition back to the meatpacking industry.

* The National Cattlemen’s Assn. appointed a task force in late 1988 to conduct a year-long study of concentration in the beef industry. The study was published in October. Its top recommendation was that “no more mergers or acquisitions of beef slaughter facilities by the Big Three packers be allowed.”

* The Center for Rural Affairs, an agricultural think tank in Walthill, Neb., will unveil a set of proposals at the end of April recommending such controversial actions as a federal cap to keep any single company from controlling too much of the meat market. That cap would be significantly lower than the market share already controlled by any of the Big Three companies, said Marty Strange, the center’s program director.

* Since the end of January, conferences addressing consolidation have been held throughout the country by interested industry groups. While the organizations vary greatly along the political spectrum, their messages are similar: Stop the Big Three now.

Call for Regulation

Actually, the message might have been “Stop the Big Three–again.” This isn’t the first time that there has been a call for meatpacking regulation. Agricultural economists love to point out that 1990 is the 100th anniversary of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was created in part to break up the so-called Beef Trust, or Big Four. The act was not particularly effective.

So when the Federal Trade Commission was established in 1914, one of its earliest actions was an investigation of the five largest meatpacking companies. The investigation’s result was a 1920 consent decree in which the “trust,” now the Big Five, agreed to forgo further consolidation and to sell stockyards, railroad equipment, refrigerated warehouses and meat stores.

Just for comparison’s sake, in the 1880s, the Big Four controlled 85% of the beef market. In the 1920s the Big Five controlled 71% of the beef market. Now that the Big Three control 70%, nothing’s being done about it, critics contend.

“Where have our antitrust laws been these past 10 years?” Helmuth wonders. “There have been zero Sherman Act violations brought by the Justice Department since 1980.”

When you’re talking market share in beef and pork, IBP is the indisputable king. It incorporated in 1960 as Iowa Beef Packers and now controls 32% of the national beef market and 15% of the pork market. IBP is a public company whose majority shareholder is Occidental Petroleum, which owns 50.5% of the stock.

Although ConAgra has been in the red meat business since the early 1980s, it occupies the No. 2 spot with 21% of the beef market and 9% of the pork market.

In its 1989 annual report, the company describes itself as the only major U.S. food company operating across the food chain:

“We have major businesses in crop protection chemicals, animal feed, fertilizer, specialty retailing, . . . grain processing, beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, seafood, processed meats, dairy products, potatoes and a broad array of consumer frozen foods.”

Its acquisitions throughout the 1980s exemplify the decade–one of the most volatile periods in the meatpacking industry. The operates 17 plants under a half dozen banners.

Size Advantage

Companies such as ConAgra say size is the only thing that saves them–enormous, efficient, one-story plants and lots of them, technologically up-to-date plants where animals can flow in one end alive and out the other as product.

“You have to have the economies of size, operate the plants on double shifts, get as many head through there per day as possible to be competitive,” said Gene Meakins, vice president of public relations for ConAgra Red Meats Cos. in Greeley, Colo. “You’re dealing–even in good times–on very narrow margins.”

Not everyone buys that argument, though. G. Edward Shuh is dean of the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and headed up a group of agricultural economists that produced a study called “Competitive Issues in the Beef Sector: Can Beef Compete in the 1990s?”

A major point in the study, Shuh said, is that, while some consolidation does save money, the Big Three have eclipsed any economy of scale by getting too big. If the top four meatpackers operated enough big plants to exhaust all economies of scale, the study said, concentration would only range from 24% to 48% instead of 70%.

The major meatpackers consider concentration a natural byproduct of intense competition in a difficult industry. Its critics, however, point to the high costs that concentration has incurred: As the big have gotten bigger, the small have gone out of business.

Between 1972 and 1987, the most recent year for which statistics are available, more than 400 slaughtering packers shut down and some 40,000 jobs were lost. The concentration in beef-packing alone tripled between 1977 and 1987, an occurrence that is “simply outside the realm of experience,” according to the Humphrey Institute study.

Litvak Meat Co. opened its doors in Denver more than 50 years ago, slaughtering about 150 calves daily and employing a half-dozen workers. At its peak, in the mid-1980s, the slaughterhouse processed 1,200 head of cattle each day and had 200 employees.

At one point, Litvak’s Denver neighborhood supported at least 15 similar enterprises within a radius of two miles. Today they’re all gone, including Litvak Meat, which shut down in 1988, a casualty of concentration.

“We weren’t able to buy the live cattle due to the fact that these Big Boys, ConAgra and Cargill (which owns Excel) needed more numbers and outbid us,” said Leonard Litvak, chairman and chief executive of the defunct company. “The FTC allowed it. I don’t think the FTC could stop it. I even wrote the Justice Department; I never heard back.”

Casualties of War

Then there are the farmers, particularly those who operate feedlots and fatten cattle for slaughter. After studying beef prices for a decade, Bruce Marion found that purchase prices paid to farmers were between 0.5% and 1% lower in areas of greatest concentration than they were in areas where many packinghouses operated.

“If you start looking at it from the standpoint of how much do cattle feeders lose in a year that they would have gotten if they had more competitive markets, you’re talking about $50 million a year,” said Marion, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Workers at meatpacking plants have also lost out through concentration and the closure of plants, according to economists and union representatives. In the 1950s, the meatpacking industry instituted cost of living increases for hourly workers, said Patrick Luby, a vice president and economist at Oscar Mayer Foods Corp.

“During the early 1980s, lower-paying companies were expanding,” Luby said. “They had no cost of living agreements. They drove out the old-line pork packers. Many of the plants were sold to new ownership, closed and reopened with lower pay scales. The labor costs did come down or level off.”

The same was true for beef, according to Lewie Anderson, a United Food & Commercial Workers Union vice president. And the union did little to stop it, Anderson said. In fact, industry watchers agree that the union’s strength has greatly diminished.

“The Big Three have not only slashed worker wages, but they have kept the wages of workers depressed for a protracted period of time,” Anderson said in “Return to the Jungle,” a position paper written last year. And concentration has affected wages throughout the industry.

Henry Lopez, a meatpacker at Oscar Mayer’s Vernon plant, hasn’t gotten a raise in the past 10 years. An hourly wage of $10.69 sounded good in 1980, but living at that level for a decade makes it tough to afford such things as health care and college tuition for his two daughters.

Early this month he got the news that the UFCW and Oscar Mayer had negotiated a 25-cent hourly raise, but that did little to improve Lopez’s spirits or those of his more than 500 colleagues. Because by the end of September, the Oscar Mayer plant will close.

“Here’s this company I gave 20 years of my best labor to, and they’re throwing us out the door,” Lopez said. “I don’t understand why I have to leave. I know I’ve given them my best.”

While wages have been depressed because of concentration, Oscar Mayer officials said their plant will close “because the cost of doing business at that plant has steadily increased,” said James Aehl, corporate spokesman. “It has become increasingly difficult to remain competitive in an increasingly competitive industry.”

The Vernon plant was built before World War II and has been renovated several times since, Aehl said. But it’s still a relatively small five-story facility in an era when “new breed” plants are bigger and only one story tall. Multistory plants lose efficiency because meat must be moved from floor to floor instead of flowing through from processing to warehousing.

“You have machinery in plants being technologically bypassed,” Aehl said. “A little bit of this is consumer change in eating more poultry products. We have not closed a large poultry plant.”

Nicholas Spaeth, North Dakota’s attorney general, said antitrust concerns in the meatpacking industry have grown sufficiently in the Midwest that the Justice Department should step in to investigate.

North Dakota, Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana together “considered trying to launch an investigation on our own, but the meatpacking industry is a national industry,” Spaeth said. “We don’t have the resources. The states involved are relatively small and rural.”

The Justice Department has received the letter, but no investigation is planned to date, said Joseph Krovisky, a department spokesman.

“Justice is aware of the concern expressed by meat-producing groups about concentration in the industry,” Krovisky said. “It has carefully monitored the industry in the past and will continue to do so. We do not have any action pending against any of the meatpackers.”

Which basically leaves any action up to the states themselves. Groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Assn. are calling for an end to concentration, but not a breakup of the largest packers. And the National Farmers Union is working with several states to get legislation passed that will do that.

In Kansas, legislation has been introduced to prohibit large packing plants and grain companies from owning and operating feedlots, said Bruce Larkin, a Democrat who represents the state’s 62nd District. “I’d like to see the individuality stay in the operations and maintain more competition.”

The legislation’s intent: antitrust. Its future: questionable.

“It hasn’t been killed,” he said. “But for all practical purposes, it is not going anywhere this year.”

CONCENTRATION IN THE MEATPACKING INDUSTRY

1988: 69.7%

Source, Department of Agriculture

PLANT CLOSURES: IOWA AND NEBRASKA

Between 1969 and 1989, the following beef plants were closed in the states of Iowa and Nebraska, displacing an estimated 7,000 workers.

NEBRASKA

1 Omaha, Nebraska Armour B.C. Dressed Beef Wilson American Beef Palmayer Beef

2 Scottsbluff Swift

3 Grand Island, Nebraska Swift

4 Lincoln American Stores

IOWA

1 Des Moines, Iowa Swift Wilson

2 Estherville Morrell

3 Oakland Spencer Foods

4 Spencer Spencer Beef

5 Council Bluffs American Beef

6 Sioux City Needham Pack Raskin Pack Meyer Pack Mid-States

7 Fort Dodge IBP

8 Postville Hygrade

9 Denison Dubuque

Source: United Food and Commercial Workers Union

Maria L. La Ganga

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Maria L. La Ganga is a Metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She has covered six presidential elections and served as bureau chief in San Francisco and Seattle.

2011 – Cattlemen struggle against giant meatpackers and economic squeezes

2012 – Obama’s Game of Chicken

 

The “Omaha Platform” of the People’s Party (1892)

In 1892, the People’s, or Populist, Party crafted a platform that indicted the corruptions of the Gilded Age and promised government policies to aid “the people.”

PREAMBLE

The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people.

Silver, which has been accepted as coin since the dawn of history, has been demonetized to add to the purchasing power of gold by decreasing the value of all forms of property as well as human labor, and the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and enslave industry. A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.

Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and chief who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of “the plain people,” with which class it originated. We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

We declare that this Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for the nation; that it cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are in name, one united brotherhood of free men.

Our country finds itself confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the history of the world; our annual agricultural productions amount to billions of dollars in value, which must, within a few weeks or months, be exchanged for billions of dollars’ worth of commodities consumed in their production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of combines and rings, the impoverishment of the producing class. We pledge ourselves that if given power we will labor to correct these evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the terms of our platform.

We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.

While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we nevertheless regard these questions, important as they are, as secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of free institutions depend; and we ask all men to first help us to determine whether we are to have a republic to administer before we differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered, believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied and equal rights and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women of this country.

PLATFORM

We declare, therefore—

First.—That the union of the labor forces of the United States this day consummated shall be permanent and perpetual; may its spirit enter into all hearts for the salvation of the Republic and the uplifting of mankind.

Second.—Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical.

Third.—We believe that the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads, and should the government enter upon the work of owning and managing all railroads, we should favor an amendment to the Constitution by which all persons engaged in the government service shall be placed under a civil-service regulation of the most rigid character, so as to prevent the increase of the power of the national administration by the use of such additional government employes.

FINANCE.—We demand a national currency, safe, sound, and flexible, issued by the general government only, a full legal tender for all debts, public and private, and that without the use of banking corporations, a just, equitable, and efficient means of distribution direct to the people, at a tax not to exceed 2 per cent. per annum, to be provided as set forth in the sub-treasury plan of the Farmers’ Alliance, or a better system; also by payments in discharge of its obligations for public improvements.

1. We demand free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the present legal ratio of l6 to 1.
2. We demand that the amount of circulating medium be speedily increased to not less than $50 per capita.
3. We demand a graduated income tax.
4. We believe that the money of the country should be kept as much as possible in the hands of the people, and hence we demand that all State and national revenues shall be limited to the necessary expenses of the government, economically and honestly administered.
5. We demand that postal savings banks be established by the government for the safe deposit of the earnings of the people and to facilitate exchange.

TRANSPORTATION—Transportation being a means of exchange and a public necessity, the government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people. The telegraph, telephone, like the post-office system, being a necessity for the transmission of news, should be owned and operated by the government in the interest of the people.

LAND.—The land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, and alien ownership of land should be prohibited. All land now held by railroads and other corporations in excess of their actual needs, and all lands now owned by aliens should be reclaimed by the government and held for actual settlers only.

EXPRESSION OF SENTIMENTS

Your Committee on Platform and Resolutions beg leave unanimously to report the following:

Whereas, Other questions have been presented for our consideration, we hereby submit the following, not as a part of the Platform of the People’s Party, but as resolutions expressive of the sentiment of this Convention.

1. RESOLVED, That we demand a free ballot and a fair count in all elections and pledge ourselves to secure it to every legal voter without Federal Intervention, through the adoption by the States of the unperverted Australian or secret ballot system.
2. RESOLVED, That the revenue derived from a graduated income tax should be applied to the reduction of the burden of taxation now levied upon the domestic industries of this country.
3. RESOLVED, That we pledge our support to fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors.
4. RESOLVED, That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.
5. RESOLVED, That we cordially sympathize with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor, and demand a rigid enforcement of the existing eight-hour law on Government work, and ask that a penalty clause be added to the said law.
6. RESOLVED, That we regard the maintenance of a large standing army of mercenaries, known as the Pinkerton system, as a menace to our liberties, and we demand its abolition. . . .
7. RESOLVED, That we commend to the favorable consideration of the people and the reform press the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum.
8. RESOLVED, That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people.
9. RESOLVED, That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.
10. RESOLVED, That this convention sympathizes with the Knights of Labor and their righteous contest with the tyrannical combine of clothing manufacturers of Rochester, and declare it to be a duty of all who hate tyranny and oppression to refuse to purchase the goods made by the said manufacturers, or to patronize any merchants who sell such goods.

 

Source: Edward McPherson, A Handbook of Politics for 1892 (Washington D.C.: James J. Chapman, 1892), 269-271.

“Our old idea of government was that of the policeman whose job it was to keep the peace, leaving the individual free to do almost anything he might wish to do.” Well, it didn’t work!

“This idea of government at last brought us face to face with the dustbowls, eroded hillsides, denuded forest areas, mined the earth of mineral wealth, wasted and destroyed our soil fertility and permitted the strong and powerful to become more powerful, and the weak to become weaker.”

And now today in 2020, we are left with a no-rules corporate-controlled government, the loss of the majority of our farmers and ranchers, along with the rural communities they support. We are now nearly fully dependent on foreign corporations for the most important necessity of life – our food. How could this have happened?

If we’re going to invest trillions of dollars into our economy, a large part of it better go to rebuilding our ability to feed ourselves healthy food from people who know how to practice good land stewardship and animal husbandry – not the failed land-grant/corporate industrial global supply chain.

Thanks to NFU historian, Tom Giessel, for the 1938 article.

By Gilles Stockton

The boys at USDA and the National Cattlemen’s Big Business Association must be really bummed that their shares in ear tag companies have crashed along with the rest of the Wall Street economy.  Last year it looked like they had triumphed in their scheme to mandate that cattlemen buy RFID tags for all of the cows. Then R-Calf went and sued USDA, crushing that whole conspiracy. The Ear Tag Boys were regrouping this winter with editorials, admonishing us ignorant cattle producers for being ignorant, but now this effort is on hold because the whole economy has fizzled because of a human disease epidemic.

There is a lesson here.  The key to prevailing over a pandemic is preparedness.  I am impressed with how our medical professionals have rallied to confront a disease for which they were not well prepared. They were not ready for this particular virus but they are determined to use all of their medical skills and training. The Coronavirus may not have been anticipated, but the livestock industry knows exactly what disease is most likely to infect the cattle and we even know from which country it is most likely to come – Brazil.

There will be no excuse for not being prepared to address foot and mouth disease (FMD). Once introduced into this country, FMD will require a very rapid vaccination campaign to immunize all livestock in a ring around each point of clinical symptoms. FMD is highly infectious and strikes all cloven-hoofed animals, including deer and feral pigs. The only way to stop such a disease is to be prepared with the proper vaccine.  Complicating things is that there are a couple of dozen strains of FMD, each requiring its own vaccine. However, the most likely type will be the one they have in Brazil.

The scary truth is that our national vaccine bank is nearly empty because of the Ear Tag Boy’s obsession with requiring RFID tags – a useless mandate. Once FMD is here, tracing an infected cow back to her home of origin is irrelevant because what needs doing is to look for symptoms and respond accordingly.

RFID tags are also not needed to control brucellosis or tuberculosis. The metal ear tags and hot iron brands worked perfectly well to nearly eliminate those two diseases.  Brucellosis is still with us because our government is protecting the last source of infection in Yellowstone Park’s elk and bison.  Tuberculosis keeps popping up because it is endemic in our neighbor to the south.  The solution is to stop Mexican cattle imports, test Mexican migrant workers, and assist Mexico in eliminating tuberculosis in their country. RFID tags have nothing to do with it.

Cattle producers are not Luddites.  We incorporate new technology and innovative practices in our operations when it makes sense. It is clear that RFID tags have a place in many cattle operations. Instead of obsessing about making all producers comply, the veterinary authorities should look at the steady adoption of electronic identification as an opportunity to perfect their systems.

There are all kinds of potential problems with the electronic data systems.  Where will the information be stored and who should have legitimate access to it?  This is not at all clear. We hear that often calves are retagged once sold. This makes no sense. What is needed are policies that require standardization. The big hole in the system is making packers keep the proper ID with the actual carcass?  Unless packers do that, everything else is wasted time, money, and energy. Lastly, there needs to be a method to erase the number from the database once that animal is dead and gone?

Australia jumped on the RFID system a number of years back, without thinking these issues through.  They ended up with a mess and caused a lot of expense and trouble for little benefit.  Since the US cattle industry is voluntarily moving towards adopting RFID technology for reasons other than disease surveillance, all USDA needs to do is piggyback on that trend, perfecting their systems as it comes about.

It is long past time to stop arguing over RFID tags and start planning about what really needs doing – preventing the importation of FMD and preparing to do something about it should it get into our country.

Gilles Stockton

Grass Range, Montana

Wouldn’t many smaller decentralized processing plants reduce our risk and serve our nation better. Four meatpackers essentially control the slaughter market in the U.S. All are multinational, searching the globe for the cheapest beef to falsely label and sell in the U.S. market, eliminating any possibility for U.S. cattlemen to receive a fair price.