Chipotle: Selling Idealism – Delivering the opposite

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Mike Callicrate

The May 13th article, Soaring Earnings of Chipotle’s 2 Bosses Raise Investor Unease, inspired the following story of my experience with Chipotle:

Years ago, when I first saw the Chipotle big burrito, “Food with integrity” bill board, I thought what a great marketing campaign. But was it true?

I was part of an effort at Colorado College to replace Sodexo with Bon Appetit. Sara, a young student activist was leading the charge. We were successful. Bon Appetite is now one of Ranch Foods Directs best customers. Colorado College students are now eating well. Sara went to work for Chipotle upon graduating. She arranged a meeting for me to talk about working with Chipotle in the local area. June 2010 was our first delivery to the Colorado Springs Chipotles. I was very enthusiastic about the possibilities, especially the possibility of a national chain food company developing logistics that allowed the use of local food – acting in a way that builds communities instead of extracting from them. It hadn’t been done before.

Things couldn’t have gone better. The quality and consistency was great, customers were loving it. Pricing worked. Head purchasing agent, Doug George, was happy with our facilities, our product and my humane, no performance enhancing drugs and overall methods of production. My protocol of production affidavit and other agreements were on file with the company. A $185,000 slicing machine was put to work at Ranch Foods.

I stopped by the Chipotle headquarters in Denver sometime following our start of doing business. After a successful meeting with Doug George and Sara, Sara informed me confidentially that she would be leaving Chipotle. I asked why? She simply responded, “Tyson chicken?”

Chipotle produced the video, “Back to the Start”. It’s the story of hog farmer, Russ Kremer. Like myself, Russ left the university in the middle 1970’s with a model of industrial factory farming in his head. He realized later his training in animal science was a long way from animal husbandry. I promoted the film and it’s message in speeches and presentations. I was worried about the “Tyson chicken”, but thought the company was headed in the right direction. I believed a new day was possible for family farmers and ranchers to access the marketplace at a fair price and in a big way. Shareholders appeared to support sourcing good healthy food from family farmers.

We had been asking Chipotle staff to visit our cattle operation in St. Francis, KS since we started doing business. Finally in August 2012, three Chipotle representatives came to visit the cattle operation. We had a full day planned beginning in St. Francis, ending the day at the processing plant in Colorado Springs. They toured the plant the following morning.

I had an ugly feeling that something was up after I met Joel Martin, one of the three Chipotle representatives and former Meyer Natural Angus (operates under the Cargill umbrella) employee. Joel pretty well knew the business, but was describing a protocol different than the one agreed upon with Chipotle.

I have argued for years that the “never-ever” antibiotic and hormone protocol was a fraud. In the best of management and production programs an animal will still get sick and deserves good animal health treatment with all the withdrawals adhered to. I’ve watched the Coleman “never-ever” beef program for the last thirty years and knew how false affidavits were being used to qualify cattle for the premium prices. Starving ranchers and feeders were being asked to do the impossible, so they were cheating – and still are.

The protocol I registered with USDA accounted for the misuse of antibiotics while still leaving the possibility of responsible antibiotic use for treatment when needed. Chipotle had agreed it made sense.

nosubtherapeutic

By the end of the day of August 5, 2012, I was done selling to Chipotle. No mention of my investment in equipment and inventories of meat. Simply, “You don’t meet our protocol. We have to move on.”, click. Joel Martin didn’t like that we branded our cattle, he didn’t like our method of horn removal (a rare occurrence with Angus cattle), our method of castration (I invented the humane, bloodless and drug free method) or that we fed milk replacer to calves that lost their mothers, he didn’t like our USDA inspected mobile slaughter unit, and he didn’t like that Ranch Foods Direct was buying beef in addition to my Callicrate Beef, from other producers operating under the same RFD protocol (building a new local/regional food system). But he did suggest that Chipotle could continue buying From Ranch Foods Direct if we would take a lower price.

I learned that Chipotle was being sued by their shareholders for poor financial performance (not anticipating the increase in food prices after the 2008 run-up). Perhaps a motivation to reduce food costs?

Joel Martin was demanding a protocol of production that he knew was impossible to produce – a protocol not-to-buy. Chipotle could say they were doing the best they could, but were forced to buy in the commodity market. Of course plans for aggressive expansion continued, despite the fact that they had not met the “food with Integrity” promise on their existing stores.

The Colorado Springs Chipotle’s replaced the good beef from Ranch Foods Direct with meat from OSI Industries:

osi

OSI is a very large multinational corporation operating out of 50 locations in seventeen countries. OSI has a strategic partnership with Marfrig, the second largest meat packer in South America. Some of the cheapest beef in the world comes from South America, which is suffering ongoing problems with Hoof and Mouth disease (HMD) and recently reported a second case of Mad Cow Disease (BSE).

OSI push into poultry production in China: ‘It’s a different model’
chicken
By Rita Jane Gabbett on 3/19/2014
CHICAGO — Four years ago Aurora, Ill. based OSI Group decided to start growing and processing its own chicken in China to better serve its large food service customers like McDonald’s and Yum! Brands. From a new operation set to start production this year, OSI will grow and process 120 million chickens per year.

OSI Group Chief Financial Officer Bill Weimer told participants at The State of Food and Agribusiness conference here that the chicken business in China is a different model and the company is still honing its business model there.

OSI entered the Chinese market to better control the food safety aspect of the chicken it provided its customers. Unlike the U.S. poultry industry model, this meant investing millions of dollars per grower operation. In addition, grain is produced on such a smaller scale and in such a more fragmented way that feed costs are nearly double those in the United States.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, has been finding a market for the breast meat OSI produces in China. The company sells mostly dark meat and wings to McDonald’s and Yum! Brands in that market.

So far, Weimer said, most Chinese consumers have not valued the higher cost of production implicit in OSI’s state-of-the-art production and food safety practices. He said the company must seek out affluent Chinese customers in urban centers such as Shanghai, as well as find export markets for these chicken parts not needed by its key food service customers.

The law firm Mayer Brown hosted the conference.

OSI is one of three large companies in the country with the capacity to cook pathogen contaminated meat (there’s a lot of it these days) for sale as pre-cooked, value-added items and meals.

Instead of the promises of the marketing department aligning with operations, it appears that they continue to further diverge.

It is important to note that the combined annual CEO salary is 2,800 times more than that of the starting “Crew Member’s” annual income (based on the $8-$9 hourly wage and a 40 hour work week). The co-CEOs make in 45 minutes what their beginning workers make in a year.

Family farmers and ranchers are still waiting for the opportunity to sell into a fair marketplace.

Mike Callicrate
Ranch Foods Direct

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RURAL ROADS TO SECURITY: The Curse of Factory Farming

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Mike Callicrate

ruralroads
RURAL ROADS TO SECURITY
America’s Third Struggle for Freedom

RT. REV. MSGR. LUIGI G. LIGUTTI, LL.D

Copyright, 1940

The Bruce Publishing Company
Printed in the U.S.A.

Excerpt beginning on page 92:

The Curse of Factory Farming

Tenancy and land speculation constitute a very serious economic menace and should be reduced to a minimum. But there is a more serious economic menace on the horizon which also involves the land, and follows when ownership and tenant systems break down; namely, corporation farming. Although this menace has not progressed very far, yet it is very serious because it is being promoted by the industrialized, urban-minded, mechanized, stock-gambling forces of this generation. The unsound, agricultural technique of corporation farming will ultimately bring this system to naught. But America, unless we do some thinking and take effective action, may try this unsound agriculture too, if for no other reason than that it makes so many promises under the aegis of our American economic idol, the corporation.

Corporation farming will in time destroy itself with its mechanical methods in a field essentially biological, but before this stupidity will reap its empty harvest, our American families will be finally and completely uprooted from the soil. All ownerships will pass to United Farms Incorporated. All rural skills, cultural patterns, traditions, communities will be obliterated. In many places, if not all places, the present farm population will be replaced by people not now engaged in agriculture, for the inefficient land corporations will have great need of imported cheap labor. They will have to reduce the populations in their wheat, corn, cotton, livestock, and fruit factories – their vast soil-mining territories. Any rural homesteads remaining on soil acquired by them will have to be removed. Gigantic, collectivized mass shelters will have to be provided for the men and women and children who will come to the company camps. These laborers may be left to camp on the roadsides as we have witnessed in California and Missouri. Homesteads for these people will be unthinkable. They entire corporation process will make it clear that in its philosophy the giant factory farm is more important than the farmer who it reduces to the status of the proletarian hired man. Tenancy does much harm to our rural population; but it remains for the land corporation to destroy the farm homes, reduce the farm families to serfs, and erase forever all the economic, social, and spiritual values in our traditionally free and independent, brave and democratic American rural life. This last octopus of Wall Street will drive the remaining families from the land and crush the enterprises upon which they have spent the best years of their life – the personally owned and controlled productive enterprises on which democracy is built. Senator Arthur Capper gives a correct report on corporation farming and its destructive implications when he says:

Corporation farming is bad public policy. It is dangerous… Every farmer and every business man in rural America and every worker in the big industrial centers should oppose it. I feel that we are justified by the facts as known and the possibilities of the future as indicated by those facts, in using every proper means to nip this corporate farming development before it gets firmly established.9

In the areas where farm corporations have picked up the title deeds to their 20,000- and 30,000-acre tracts, the experience of the man, the farm home, the farm family, the school, the church, the community has been a sad one. In these areas social and spiritual leaders have learned what to expect under a system of factory farming. These leaders know that their social, moral, and spiritual institutions are given but a small chance to establish themselves and can never hope to become vital factors in these rootless communities of landless people who are allowed to become even more transient than the harvest in their efforts to find work in the specialized farm factories.

Mark A. Dawber gives us a sound warning when he writes:

The maintenance of the family the year-round is not the overhead of farming. It is the overhead of civilization. Replace individual farmers with floating hands employed for a few months in the year and you might just as well nail shut the doors of the churches and the institutions of learning. Individual farmers, not floating farm hands, rear children and give opportunities for scholastic education.10

A picture of what he calls “floating farm hands” is graphically give us in these verses. It will not readily be forgotten.

THE MOVERS
The East wind whips the skirts of the snow
with a passing shower,
and over Iowa on the first of March
wheels churn hub deep in the mud
or grit their teeth across the icy roads.

Home is only a shadow
flying down the wind in a
twisted swirl of snowflakes,
traveling down the road in an old lumber wagon
drawn by two shaggy horses
whose bones are too big for their flesh.

Even the wild goose
is not so homeless as these movers.
Peering ahead through the sliding curtain
of March rain they pass
with the furniture of home packed in a wagon.
Past corner, past grove, to the hilltop they go
until only chairlegs point from the skyline
like roots of trees torn from the earth.
And they are gone…

The Rural Family In Mass Production
This, the parade of the landless, the tenants,
the dispossessed,
but of their Canaan they march
with Moses asleep in the Bible.

Who will call them back, who will ask:
are you the chosen people, do you inherit
only a backward glance and a cry and a heartbreak?
Are you the meek?
But the early twilight
drops like a shawl on their shoulders
and sullen water
slowly fills the wagon ruts and the hoof prints.
-James Hearst of Maplehearst, Country Men
(The Prairie Press)

wagon
——
9 Dawber, M. A., quoted in Rebuilding Rural America (New York: Friendship Co., 1937), p. 38.
10 Ibid., p. 40.

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Tail Docking Bill: Fight Back Against Industrial Farming

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Mike Callicrate

Brian: Last Friday, six animal welfare ballot initiatives, three constitutional and three statutory, received title status from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. Mike Callicrate, Colorado Rancher and co-sponsor of the ballot initiatives, explains that he is supporting these bills in an effort to fight back against industrial farming, pushing for more consumer education, and support for family farmers and ranchers. He discusses Title 98.

Mike: It’s an amendment to the Colorado Constitution providing that it is not a defense to a charge under the Animal Cruelty Statue, that a livestock or companion animal is treated in accordance with an accepted animal husbandry practice. Now that causes producers heartburn but the problem is we never decided what an accepted animal husbandry practice is. But it’s a wide open excuse to do anything you want to an animal and my example is: how does a sow get into a gestation crate?
It certainly doesn’t happen with a family farmer! It doesn’t happen with a hog farmer! It happens with a big corporation that wants to hire cheaper labor and get farmers off the land and replaced with refugee workers. That is something we’ll be discussing as we go forward in this initiative and to see what actually is going to end up on the ballot.

Brian: One side note, he says he created the Callicrate Banders for cattle producers to use as needed. However, he says that although it’s acceptable to tail dock sheep, cattle tails in general don’t need to be docked, as they are used and needed to swat flies. According to Colorado Commissioner of Agriculture John Salazar, only one dairy in the state of Colorado uses tail docking. Mike Callicrate is being backed by the Humane Society of the United States and right now they are working to gather 80,000 plus signatures needed to get those initiatives on the ballot this November.

Brian Allmer | The BARN / Barn Media & the Colorado Ag News Networks

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Mike Callicrate and some activists want state voters to ban cow docking

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Mike Callicrate

Tail of woe

by J. Adrian Stanley | The Colorado Springs Independent

Cow uncut: Soon you could sign to protect that tassel.

Cow uncut: Soon you could sign to protect that tassel.

Six proposed Colorado ballot initiatives seem to address one humble topic: a cow’s tail.

The Humane Society of the United States, animal rights activists, farmers and ranchers such as Mike Callicrate are working to get an initiative on the ballot that would ban bovine tail docking. That’s the practice of removing up to two-thirds of a cow’s tail, either by whacking it with a blade, or, more commonly, fastening a tight band around the tail to restrict blood flow, causing the tail to fall off.

Docking is increasingly unpopular, particularly in Colorado. It can be painful for cows, and it prevents them from using their tails to shoo away flies. There doesn’t appear to be a scientific reason to dock. Experts say it started in New Zealand decades ago, after studies showed it might lead to cleaner milk, because the tassel on a cow’s tail can get caked with feces and mud. Later studies, however, didn’t show a correlation.

Temple Grandin, the noted professor of animal science at Colorado State University, tells the Indy she doesn’t believe in tail-docking cows, especially when any problems can be eliminated by trimming the tassel. But she also hasn’t come out in support of a ban. She says she prefers to see changes in livestock treatment come from consumer and industry pressure, and she’s worried that a law might not be worded narrowly enough.

A fuzzy law — and some of the proposed initiatives are fuzzy — could draw all sorts of agricultural practices into question, from castration to slaughter. That’s worried some farmers and agricultural advocates. But that’s not the only issue raised by this proposal. Others include the role of government, the rights of animals, and even the future of the American cowboy.

Years in the making

Jacquelyn Pyun, Colorado state director of the Humane Society of the United States, says her organization began working on a tail docking ban in 2008.

“We believe this is animal cruelty,” she says. “So we’re going to take the necessary steps to see [it] banned.”

An initiative requires 86,105 valid signatures, by Aug. 4, to get on the ballot. Pyun says that shouldn’t be a problem — the Society has tens of thousands of active volunteers in Colorado.

But passing an initiative wasn’t the way the Society initially envisioned this. Pyun says her organization had conversations with the Department of Agriculture, the governor’s office, farmers, industry groups, state representatives and senators. In 2013, Rep. Steve Lebsock, D-Thornton, introduced a bill that would have banned docking dairy cows’ tails unless the procedure was performed by a veterinarian using anesthesia. The bill was killed before it could reach the Senate.

While many organizations have come out against tail docking — including the National Milk Producers Federation and the American Veterinary Medical Association — others, like the Colorado Farm Bureau, opposed a ban.

Chad Vorthmann, executive vice president of the Bureau, says he thinks industry and consumers should decide agriculture practices, not lawmakers. “[It] doesn’t make us look like a very dairy-friendly state,” he says.

Chris Kraft, a dairy farmer in northeastern Colorado who doesn’t dock his cows’ tails, also opposed the ban. “It’s the beginning of a slippery slope, to where we’re going to have codified animal practices,” he says.

A few farms in Colorado still tail-dock, most notably Empire Dairy in Wiggins. And Kraft says docking can make sense on certain farms. He says he knows of one farmer who started docking after a worker was injured trying to trim a cow’s tassel.

Change of heart

Callicrate, who raises cattle for beef, sees it differently.

“It’s simply a way to allow [cows] to be in a dirty condition and have less manure at the milking line,” he says.

Callicrate is the rancher and activist behind Callicrate Beef, which he produces hormone-free in Kansas and sells locally via Ranch Foods Direct. In the ranching world, he’s probably best known for an early invention: the Callicrate Bander, a tool that’s used to “humanely” castrate animals, and for other agricultural purposes — like docking tails. His opponents have noted that irony.

Callicrate says his thinking has evolved, especially after he became involved with the Humane Society of the United States a few years ago. He says he now sees tail docking not only as a cruel practice but a shortcut, like so many others, that has given big agricultural producers an unfair advantage.

“It’s just a way to try to level the field a little bit between industrial ag and the alternative family farm agriculture,” he says of a ban. “In the industrial ag world … the biggest cheater wins. And that’s where it ends up: A sow in a gestation crate, a chicken in a battery cage and a cow losing her tail in a dairy.”

— stanley@csindy.com

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Some things don’t change – Money, power and greed lead to corruption

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Mike Callicrate

famunion1918
By Mike Callicrate

Some things don’t change – In 1918 the Federal Trade Commission reported packers were “manipulating markets, restricting flow of foods, controlling the price of dressed meat, defrauding producers and consumers of food, and crushing competition.” Five packers (Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Swift and Wilson) controlled half the market. The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was legislated to prevent another catastrophic monopoly-like meat trust from forming again. Today, four packers control 85% of the market, and predictably, the results are the same!

Without antitrust laws protecting a fair, open and competitive marketplace, cattle feeders are easy prey to the big meat packers. Callicrate was a plaintiff in the 1996 meatpacker lawsuit Pickett vs. IBP.

packerretaliation

How did the big packers regain their control over the marketplace?

Capture your suppliers’ trade group

In the early years after the National Cattlemen’s Association was reorganized (1996) to include the big meat packers as members and final plans were in place to capture control of the $80 million dollar per year cattlemen’s beef checkoff (Beef Tax), there was heated debate over whether packers should be allowed to own livestock. The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act prevented meat packers from owning or controlling everything from the stockyards to retail. The Act basically was designed to prevent packers from doing anything that would have even the effect of reducing competition. Cowboys wanted to raise cattle and for packers to be packers. They wanted a tight fence between them and the packer – a competitive market. Cattle producers wanted a fair price for their cattle and the packers wanted to buy them as cheap as possible – so why were they members of the same lobbying group?

March 5, 2000, Lee Pitts wrote – “I remember the Alamo and the first NCBA Convention. When I left San Antonio four years ago after the merger I felt we in the cattle industry had just been wiped out like those independent Texans of long ago. It was a massacre. There would be no survivors. The fact that I had worked very hard to raise some valid issues about the merger and ended up being treated like the enemy was puzzling to me. But my biggest scar from the Alamo Convention was that I had been forever disillusioned with how the ‘democratic’ process DOESN’T work within our national trade organization.

“One of my main concerns about the merger was that under the new industry structure packers would have too much influence on the proposed organization without having to pay fair market value for that influence! How un-American is that?

“It’s now official policy that the NCBA will oppose any legislation that would restrict packer ownership of livestock. That was always the unofficial policy of the NCBA due to the strong influence that Texas and Kansas cattle feeders have. Now, thanks to a balloting in the Stakeholder’s Congress that included 191 voters, when that other Congress in Washington DC visits this subject they will be advised officially that the million cattlemen represented by the NCBA are against any legislation that would prevent packers from controlling the market through direct ownership of cattle.

“By the way, this piece of NCBA legislation was officially given its blessing by IBP head cattle buyer and NCBA Board member Bruce Bass.”

Obama to the rescue – The next Teddy Roosevelt?

Excerpt from candidate Obama’s REAL LEADERSHIP FOR RURAL AMERICA document:

“Prevent Anti-competitive Behavior Against Family Farms: In an era of market consolidation, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will fight to ensure family and independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices. Obama is a strong supporter of Senator Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) legislation that protects independent producers by banning the ownership of livestock by meat packers, and he will fight for passage of the law as president. Today meatpackers produce more than 20 percent of the nation’s hogs, and their share is growing. When meatpackers own livestock, they bid less aggressively for the hogs and cattle produced by independent farmers. When supplies are short and prices are rising, they are able to stop buying livestock, which disrupts the market.

“The 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act prohibits price discrimination by meatpackers against small and mid-size farmers, but the law has not been enforced. Obama will issue regulations for what constitutes undue price discrimination and his administration will enforce the law. He will also strengthen anti-monopoly laws; change federal agriculture policy to strengthen producer protection from fraud, abuse, and market manipulation; and make sure that farm programs are helping family farmers, as opposed to large, vertically integrated corporate agribusiness.”

In 1978, when I built the first feedyard in Cheyenne County, Kansas with a group of local investors, we could sell cattle to as many as twenty meat packers located anywhere from Denver to Omaha. Packer concentration was at historic lows. The biggest and fastest growing packer, IBP, seeking guidance on how to further increase its market share and profits, had already been advised by the Boston Consulting Group to cooperate, rather than compete with the other big packers. The fool’s game was on, but those being played for fools didn’t know it yet. By 1988, after I built my own feedyard, we smelled the rat. By 1994, even in the face of increasing demand, the spring market collapsed $17/cwt. in six weeks. NCBA’s plan for packer control of the cattle industry, modeled after the chicken and pork sectors, was falling into place. Over 1,500 cattlemen gathered in Omaha for the announcement of a lawsuit. The market recovered $12 in the next couple of weeks, and cattlemen settled down, not recognizing the markets were responding to manipulation by the big packers rather than recovering as a result of fair and open competition.

By 1998, I was down to one packer-buyer, and by January of 1999, I had none.

I called the Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, the top enforcer of the Packers and Stockyards Act. I asked the Secretary why he wasn’t doing his job. He responded, “It’s different now [It’s not 1921], in today’s global market we need big companies that can do business globally.” He ordered ConAgra (formerly Monfort, now JBS/Swift) to buy all of my existing cattle, after which I closed my feedyard. Fifteen families lost their jobs and the community lost a buyer of locally grown cattle and feed.

over39k

bigpackerfeedyard

JBS Five Rivers Cattle Feeding LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of JBS. Five Rivers has a combined feeding capacity of more than 980,000 head of cattle with locations in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Idaho. In addition to these locations, Five Rivers (on behalf of JBS Food Canada) manages a 75,000 head capacity feedyard in Brooks, Alberta, Canada.

Despite the wisdom, foresight and courage of presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the Congress of the early 1900s, today’s “robber baron” packers – JBS, Tyson, Cargill and National Beef – operate outside the law, with their boot firmly on the necks of cattle producers and their hands deep in the consumer’s pocket. Ranchers have gone out of business in droves, and we’re now left with the smallest cowherd since the early 1950s. Retail prices for beef have skyrocketed to the highest levels in history. Rural communities are devastated, people and animals are being exploited and abused, and the environment degraded by gigantic industrial operations: everything the Congress of 1921 had worked to avoid has happened.

December 6, 2011 – “But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest. And so he busted up monopolies…”
Remarks by President Obama in Osawatomie, Kansas, four months after the resignation of Christine Varney, U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division

Today, 14 years after Lee Pitts wrote Blue Ribbons/Red Faces: Packer control of NCBA, the cattle industry is decimated. Thankfully, Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had the leadership, courage and stamina it took to go after the highly concentrated wealth and power that was crushing competition in the early 1900s. President Obama made promises and held hearings that farmers spent valuable time and money traveling to in order to tell their stories, but in the end he did nothing. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney left the job for the generous financial benefits of a corporate position. Philip Weiser, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, left to rejoin the faculty at the University of Colorado. Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administrator Dudley Butler went home to his farm in Mississippi and continues the fight for fair markets. The president’s lack of support and the departure of the top cops gave the nod for the packers to continue raping America’s farmers, ranchers and rural communities with impunity.

In an unbelievable affront to the cattlemen driven to liquidation, their demise was financed with the cattlemen’s own money – the mandatory Beef Checkoff! Over 80% of NCBA’s overhead is paid by the beef tax, purportedly legislated to help cattle producers increase demand for their product. NCBA continues to lobby against the interests of U.S. cattle producers, opposing Country of Origin Labeling for beef, pushing for opening our borders to more cheap foreign beef, opposing market transparency and fighting enforcement of antitrust laws like the Packers and Stockyards Act. NCBA and their meat packer partners continue to ignore the harmful effects their aggressive promotion of technologies like “Pink Slime” and performance enhancing drugs have on beef demand.

With over 40% of our ranchers now out of business, over 39,000 [80,000 in 2020] cattle feeding operations closed, and the U.S. now food insecure, it’s well past time to fully expose the fraud of NCBA, separate them from their beef tax slush fund, and hold them, the packers, and the Obama administration accountable for this historic debacle. Then we can begin the work of breaking up the meat packers and other food sector monopolies and begin rebuilding a new food system that serves everyone!

OCM WINTER 2014 NEWSLETTER ARTICLES

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