For Immediate Release: September 28, 2023
Contact: R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard
Phone: 406-252-2516; r-calfusa@r-calfusa.com
Please find below R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary that discusses why cattle producers need to start supporting the organization or organizations that are fighting to preserve their freedom, liberty, and independence. It is in three formats: written, audio and video. Anyone is welcome to use it for broadcasting or reporting.
Tag, You’re It
Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA
In just a few short words, I’m going to boast about R-CALF USA’s greatest contribution to the U.S. cattle industry.
For over two decades, we have prevented the beef packing sector from capturing the live cattle supply chain just as the pork and poultry packers have already captured the hog and chicken supply chains.
Let’s break this down. Here was the strategy that resulted in the capture of the hog industry:
First, through mergers and acquisitions the largest pork packers concentrated the hog market leaving just a handful of packers to determine who could have timely access to the market and who could not.
Second, the pork packers shrank and then all but eliminated the hog cash market, making it difficult if not impossible to market hogs unless producers agreed to enter an alternative marketing arrangement, which was either a marketing contract or production contract, with a particular packer.
Without timely access to a competitive cash market, the pork packers could choose which producers would stay in business through an alternative marketing arrangement and which ones would perish because they were not offered such an arrangement.
In just four decades, 90% of all independent hog producers exited the industry.
Today the hog industry is highly industrialized with relatively few producers, few if any cash marketing opportunities, and far fewer packers.
This was a successful model for the packers. They controlled the supply chain, controlled the marketing, and just a handful of them are left to divide up the spoils. But it put our nation’s food security at risk. Do you remember during Covid when grocery stores had no pork to sell and at the very same time the hog industry was euthanizing untold numbers of live hogs because the industrial supply chain was far too skeletonized to withstand any type of shock to the overall hog supply chain?
Now the beef packers are applying this hog model to the cattle industry. Like the pork industry, they’ve concentrated the packing sector through mergers and acquisitions. And like the pork packers, the beef packers have been working to significantly shrink the cash market to reduce if not eliminate producers’ opportunities to have timely access to a viable market unless they capitulate and enter into an alternative marketing agreement that essentially guarantees timely market access in return for committing cattle without ever negotiating even a base price.
And like the hog industry that witnessed a steep reduction in the number of independent producers, so too has the cattle industry witnessed a similar loss. You see the only real difference between the rapid loss of hog producers and rapid loss of cattle producers is that the cattle industry had twice as many independent producers than the hog industry when the purge of both industries began. In fact, where the hog industry lost 600,000 independent producers, the cattle industry comes in a close second losing over 540,000 over the same period.
But unlike the hog industry, the cattle industry still has the critical mass of producers to sustain a competitive industry, but like the hog industry, the cattle industry is losing its marketing outlets. You see the quintessential marketing outlets needed to provide the remaining independent cattle producers with competitive marketing outlets are cattle feedlots. And guess what? Our industry’s cattle feedlots are dropping like flies…we’ve lost 77% of them in just the past 25 years.
So, despite what beef industry apologists say about how it is impossible for the beef packers to do to the cattle industry what the pork packers did to the hog industry, that’s simply not true.
The beef packers have been applying their vertically integrated hog model to your cattle industry for decades, and they’ve made considerable progress. But something has interfered with their plans. That something of course is those of you who have been willing to financially support the organization or organizations who are fighting to preserve your freedom, liberty, and independence.
Don’t rely on your neighbors to fund this fight…it’s far too important to you and your children. You can’t sit on the sidelines…if you do, there will be no one to blame but yourself if the packers ever do capture from you your live cattle supply chain.
Think it can’t happen? Why not? The entire meat industry has subjected every major species to this industrialized, bigger is better and independent producers are dispensable mindset – from the poultry industry to the sheep industry to the hog industry.
The game is real, it’s unfolding before your eyes…your cattle industry is the Last Frontier, and that means tag, your it.
It’s up to you to help the organization of your choice to continue doing what we do – protect your freedom, liberty, and independence.
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R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary educates and informs both consumers and producers about timely issues important to the U.S. cattle and sheep industries and rural America.
Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA) is the largest producer-only trade association in the United States. It is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the continued profitability and viability of the U.S. cattle and sheep industries. For more information visit www.r-calfusa.com or call (406) 252-2516.
