May 5, 2017 By Steven M. Sellers Large factory farms increasingly occupy rural landscapes once dotted with small family farms, and their concentrated waste has produced a wave of toxic tort litigation. Known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, the facilities confine and raise large populations of livestock. Environmentalists say these operations supply food to such…
Hello all, Below is a chart I recently created that shows the relationship between cattle prices and consumer beef prices. It reveals that the new “lag time” (the phenomenon whereby the drop in retail beef prices occurs sometime after a drop in cattle prices) far exceeds the historical lag time, indicating that beef packers/retailers are…
IMO, antitrust laws need to be rewritten to reflect these complex issues arising from technology not available in the 1800s. Free exchange Price-bots can collude against consumers Trustbusters might have to fight algorithms with algorithms 3 hours ago Trustbusters might have to fight algorithms with algorithms MARTHA’S VINEYARD, an island off the coast of Massachusetts,…
Did someone forward you this newsletter? Get your own copy by subscribing here. Congressmen Move To Protect Big Ag from Water Protection Law Residents of rural communities near large-scale farms may soon find it harder to protect their drinking water from pollution from agriculture, thanks to a bill introduced recently by Representative Dan Newhouse, a…
By Michael Grabell Case Farms built its business by recruiting immigrant workers from Guatemala, who endure conditions few Americans would put up with. By late afternoon, the smell from the Case Farms chicken plant in Canton, Ohio, is like a pungent fog, drifting over a highway lined with dollar stores and auto-parts shops. When the…
By Ben Terris May 2 at 8:00 AM BIG SANDY, Mont. — When Sen. Jon Tester was 9 years old, he had a job: take meat from cows slaughtered on his family’s farm and feed it into the steel maw of a meat grinder. The motor took it from there, pushing the beef through four…
Two decades of overestimating future corn exports to China During the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, Chinese agriculture was thrown into chaos as peasant farmers were moved into industrial production and intellectuals were shifted into agricultural production as a part of the re-education campaign. With the death of Mao in 1976 and…
Attorney General investigating mega meat packing companies By KRQE News 13 Published: April 26, 2017, 2:58 pm Updated: April 26, 2017, 5:05 pm ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The Attorney General’s Office has launched an investigation into four mega meat packing companies. The four corporations being looked into are Cargill Inc, JBS, Tyson Foods and the…
By Peter Whoriskey May 1 at 7:21 PM The High Plains dairy complex reflects the new scale of the U.S. organic industry: It is big. Stretching across miles of pastures and feedlots north of Greeley, Colo., the complex is home to more than 15,000 cows, making it more than 100 times the size of a…
FYI. Good morning. Solid data from reputable sources in the public domain relative to the number of farmers and ranchers in financial trouble is a bit difficult to come by, so I am sharing today’s article below. Based on the high level of stress and the number of calls to the Nebraska Rural Response Hotline,…