Meeting of the Markets’ presentation held at the Isles Convention Hall in Lincoln, NE on May 17th 2012 with focus on market creation opportunities for farmers and ranchers that will create opportunities for consumers to access locally produced foods.
“There’s a lot of money in food. Food is a big profit business.” – Rick Hughes, School District 11
A major investigation into the school lunch industry is ongoing as companies that decide what food goes on your child’s plate may be cheating schools and taxpayers out of millions. Sharyl Attkisson investigates charges of a corporate rip-off.
Rick Hughes with District 11 in Colorado Springs provides an alternative to Sodexo’s bad food and it’s theft of school lunch money…
[MIKE] “This is hard stuff. This is the industrial model that we talk about that just does not work. To me, the abuse of these animals is a symptom of the industrial model which is also abusive to people. It’s abusive to the environment, it’s abusive to communities.”
[PAUL] “When you have animals who are treated as if they were machines themselves, locked up inside these industrial factories treated as they weren’t living, feeling, breathing animals, but just commodities on a product line, then you create a condition where people think that their suffering just doesn’t matter. People get desensitized toward that type of animal suffering and I think that is what enables, in a very serious way, the type of violence against animals that we see.”
[MIKE] “This is industrial agriculture demanding profit at all costs, profit over animals, profit over people, profit over the environment, and this is where we end up. This is really the end game of this absolute demand for profit at all costs. I am really sorry that agriculture has declined to this level.”
[MIKE] “This is a good example of what happens when you take the family off the farm and that family loses the farm and loses that ability to care for those animals that they deeply love and respect, and now we’ve put them in a factory. We’ve brought economic refugee labor in, and perhaps not economic refugee labor, but perhaps war refugee labor as we’ve utilized so extensively in industrial agriculture in this country. These are people who are themselves under so much pressure and essentially being exploited.
[MIKE] “I hope the public gets this and the reason for this. This is something that is completely wrong.
[MIKE] “We’ve got to change the system.”
[MIKE] “We’ve got to get back to family farm agriculture where people are taking care of livestock again. They own them and care about them.”
Shocking Animal Cruelty at Tyson Foods Supplier
I have been asked why I joined the The HSUS Agriculture Council for Colorado … 95% of HSUS Supporters eat meat. They’re concerned about where their meat comes from.
They know that family farmers and ranchers who are on the land taking care of the livestock are the best stewards, the best care takers and can produce the best food they want to eat.
And, they just know that if they do not support those family farmers and ranchers they are not going to be there.
About the Colorado Agriculture Council of HSUS
The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has announced the formation of a new advisory body in Colorado.
It’s called the The HSUS Agriculture Council for Colorado.
According to an HSUS news release, the council will work to pursue market opportunities for farmers and ranchers whose agricultural practices adhere to the group’s animal welfare standards. Leaders of the new group include Yuma veterinarian and cattleman Tom Parks and Mike Callicrate, a livestock producer and owner of Ranch Foods Direct retail center in Colorado Springs.
In 2008, Colorado’s legislature passed a measure to phase out the use of gestation crates for breeding sows and veal crates for the male offspring of dairy cows.
In 2011, HSUS organized a similar agriculture council in Nebraska in partnership with the Nebraska Farmers Union.
Recent Press Releases & Articles
“They sell things from somewhere else and take the money away everyday.”
-Francisco Chavez
Sprouts, a “pretend” local/natural/farmers market in Castle Rock, Colorado (one of 142 locations if the Sunflower Farmers Markets merger is approved), is buying the cheapest foreign beef on the planet and selling it at much higher prices than local, high quality, domestically produced beef. While Sprouts claims to be the “farmers market”, touting “local”, they give preferential shelf space to much more profitable imported foreign beef.
The Uruguay “Organic” label is not the USDA Organic logo consumers are accustomed to seeing. USDA certification represents significant costs to U.S. producers certified to sell under and display the USDA logo.
Cattle producers in Uruguay are among the poorest in the world, willing to accept some of the lowest prices anywhere. We know that the multinational meat packer cartel (Tyson, Cargill, JBS/Swift and National Beef) has been depressing prices for American cattle producers for a long time, but these anticompetitive practices now extend to many other countries, made possible through the many unfair “free” trade agreements.
The abusive monopoly-like power of these global predators is destroying local and regional foods systems all around the world, eliminating the ability for people to feed themselves from their own communities and regions. Despite that fact that the U.S. is the best beef consuming market, it continues to lose ranchers due to unfair domestic markets and global competition. The U.S. is becoming more and more dependent on foreign sources of beef (nearly 20% is imported), with now the smallest cow herd since 1952.
In today’s corporate controlled global economy, where companies like Sprouts hide behind the farmer’s face and talk about sustainability and local, people continue to be leveraged against people, community against community, country against country. People, land, water, animals and other resources are exploited and extracted in search of maximum profits.
Compare to a locally produced choice from Lasater Ranch, Matheson, CO, available in Castle Rock, CO:
Or compare to another locally produced choice available in Colorado Springs and Denver, CO:
“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.
