The Big 4– Will the Meat Monopoly Keep You Hungry and Begging?
Your food supply is at the top of a slippery slope and you probably don’t realize it
“The country that feeds itself controls its own future.” Kristi Noem, Gov. South Dakota
Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef Packing are the 4 big meat packing companies that control 85% of the meat consumed in America.
While some argue that this makes our food supply “efficient,” let’s consider it from the farmers’ and ranchers’ perspective.
The vast majority of ranchers and farmers who are raising the meat for us, are at a break even point or facing loss with every transaction.
Not surprisingly, the “Big 4” have tripled profits in the past 3 years.1
“But,” you say, “why does this matter as long as meat prices are stable or affordable at the grocery store?”
I’m so glad you asked.
Come with me as we look at an analogy to understand the situation better.
Imagine this:
You make cupcakes. Bacon cupcakes. It’s your grandmother’s famous recipe and you spent years refining your product for sale, making it the highest quality you can. You are proud of what you have made and you are ready to begin selling. You know that you have a high quality, beautiful cupcake.
Every cupcake you make has ingredients. It takes your time and energy to make them and cook them. Every cupcake requires $1 in input costs to make. Adding in your labor, it comes to $1.5 per cupcake. But you can only sell them to one of 4 cupcake distributors. These distributors are the only ones legally allowed to make and sell the cupcake boxes needed for delivery and distribution. So you sell all your cakes to one of these distributors.
Every week, you take your bulk order of cupcakes there. They pack them and deliver them to your neighborhood grocery store, the cafes, and the bakeries.
Since these cupcake distributors are the only ones who make and sell the boxes, they started telling the bakers how much they would pay for the cupcakes. They used to pay you okay. They paid everyone $1.75 per cupcake. That worked. You were able to grow your business and pay yourself. End consumers could still afford the beautiful and flavorful cupcakes.
Now, for the past few years, these companies pay you between $1.1 and $1.3 for your amazing baked art, just because they can. There are a few problems with this:
You don’t know how much they are going to pay you ahead of time. They set the prices.
What they pay isn’t enough to keep your input costs going. Input costs keep rising with inflation.
You were making a modest salary at your cupcake business. Now, this is not enough to pay yourself. You’re way below the poverty line and going further into debt just to keep the business afloat. Every day is a struggle. Your family feels it. You feel like a failure. You started working another job just to buy the ingredients. Every morning you wake up wondering how much longer these prices can keep dropping.
You’ve invested your life savings and your time and energy into perfecting your grandmother’s recipe, getting the equipment, finding suppliers for your flour, sugar, butter and vanilla. But, still, the companies that make the cupcake boxes are the only ones allowed to box them up and sell them to grocery stores, bakeries, coffee shops, and the American people.
The box distributors are raising their prices to the consumers. They are telling the consumers there might be a shortage so consumers are willing to pay the higher price, but you don’t see any of it.
Gratefully you have neighbors who just love your cupcakes. Tragically, you can’t sell your cupcakes to them.
You can give them away for free or they can be eaten at your house, but you can’t sell your cupcakes. They legally must go through one of the few companies that make the boxes and box them up for distribution. There is one exception to this rule: you can sell your cupcake batter to individual families, but only if they buy 10 gallons at a time. That’s too much to be reasonable for most families. Besides, that doesn’t do any good because most of your neighbors don’t know how to cook them correctly, let alone have the time. And, you can't even afford the right containers to sell the batter.
All the other cupcake makers in the country are struggling too. It’s so bad that most of you are about to go out of business. But if so many of you go out of business, who will be left to buy the equipment you got just a few years ago? Everyone is selling. Mixer prices are bottoming out. The oven you invested a year’s worth of profit in is going for pennies on the dollar.
Why?
Why can’t cupcake chefs make a living baking and selling to their neighbors or at the farmers market or even selling to the local coffee shop? This is not the country you thought it was.
Here is my beef
4 meat packing companies control 85% of the meat that people eat in America.
They import meat from other countries where labor is cheaper. This further depresses the price small ranchers and farmers are able to get. But that’s not all. These meat packers control the market for meat sales. Consumer prices have gone UP recently even as the meat packers are paying producers less and less.
It doesn't add up and it won’t.
Farmers and ranchers are concerned for themselves, yes, but they are also concerned for all their fellow farmers and ranchers and the impact it has on all of us, nationwide. Raising meat for the American people isn’t just a hobby. It’s not just an arbitrary business for them and their colleagues. This is a way of life. And it rarely, if ever, comes easy. Most farmers and ranchers get up crazy early to start their day. They witness the rising of the sun and take deep breaths smelling what weather Mother Nature offers for the day. They take great pride and satisfaction in knowing that their meats are destined for your family dinners, children’s birthday parties, community grilling events, weddings and anniversaries. Our farmers and ranchers are proud of the work they and their colleagues do to help Americans eat healthy and celebrate their milestones.
Now, our small farms and ranches are disappearing. These unsung heroes are struggling to understand why Americans don’t want to keep local farmers and ranchers healthy. Very few of us are making appropriate and often difficult choices to support our local food supply every day.
Friends, this is what our farmers and ranchers are going through daily.
And it is because the 4 big packers control prices on “the market.” In fact, 2 of the 4 are not even American companies.2
Your spending choices are vital to the future of farming–and food security–in America.
See, if the farmers sell their farms, what happens next?
I’ll give you a hint. We import more meat. As we import more meat, the prices the meat packers will pay to the remaining small farmers and ranchers gets even lower, forcing more American farmers out of business. Pretty soon, we are outsourcing most of the meat coming into America.
Then disaster strikes.
None of us know what that disaster looks like.
It could be:
A bad storm.
Hackers infiltrating our systems.
Supply chain disruptions (remember the pandemic??)
Price gouging.
Disease.
An enemy attack.
Rogue vegans destroying our infrastructure.
Dilapidated national power supply infrastructure.
See, when we create this kind of vulnerability, we practically invite disaster.
Let’s go back to your grandma’s famous bacon cupcakes and your bakery business for a moment…
Imagine for a moment if suddenly the 4 big companies that make the cupcake holders and sell the cupcakes are not the only ones who are allowed to do this anymore.
Imagine that now a small business a few miles from you can make and sell them.
Now, you CAN sell your cupcakes to all your neighbors and at the farmers market and at the kids’ schools and you can even sell them to the cafe down the street. This would be a LIFE CHANGER for you.
If only enough Americans cared about where their cupcakes came from…
Or meat.
Are YOU willing to keep our local farmers and ranchers in business?
If not, we will lose them. We will lose the food security that comes with having enough meat to feed ourselves. We are failing our independent farmers and ranchers.
Perhaps their struggle is intentionally created at a level outside of our daily interest?
Take Action
One food policy that we can take immediate action on, with minimal time and effort is the PRIME Act. Policies such as this are critical to regaining national food security at a local community level.
As importantly, policies like this help to save small farmers and ranchers from becoming extinct. It is one and the same.
Remember, “whoever controls the food supply controls the people.” Are you ready for that?
CBN news story, Cattle Ranchers Say Meat Packer Monopoly is Threatening Their Way of Life