Big operations are extremely cost efficient, wrote Temple Grandin, a longtime proponent of humane animal handling, in a recent op-ed for Forbes. The downside is the fragility of the supply chains, as Covid-19 proves. This pandemic is going to be a wakeup call. As farmers across the country see herd-thinning expand into cattle feedlots, and as the losses for rural communities mount, many are asking whether the entire system needs dramatic reform. In late June, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey announced an investigation into the large meat-packers, questioning their commitment to providing a safe, affordable, and abundant food supply to the nation. A tight network of smaller producers, they argue, could help ensure that our food economy is more equitable for farmers, safer for packinghouse workers, and, for consumers, more resilient and reliable in the face of crisis. The current pandemic underscores that broader argument for a new system of meat production and distribution. Droving nearly six billion animals, some two-thirds of the total number of livestock slaughtered in the United States each year, onto the kill floors of barely 100 meatpacking plants owned by just six companies not only creates an impassable bottleneck; it has also produced a potential national security threat should our food supply chain experience a sustained disruption.

The current system, however, didnt evolve by accidentand it is important to recognize that it was never intended to protect the American consumer, much less the American farmer or the American worker. To change, it will require nothing short of breaking up the Big Six and enforcing antitrust laws to their fullest extent. More than that, though, it will take a cultural change, in which we, as eaters, no longer see issues of labor, on the farm or the factory floor, as separate from questions of what is on our forks, and how it got there.

Hogs on Bernie Herickhoffs Minnesota farm lost value as they gained weight during Covid-related delivery delays.

From the very dawn of the industrial meat era, going all the way back to when Upton Sinclair started serializing his novel The Jungle in 1905, the American public has appeared unmoved by labor abuses in the meat industry. Basing his book on two months in the Packingtown district of Chicago near the old Union Stock Yards, Sinclair graphically portrayed the killing floors at Armour and Swift, where supervisors moved through each room with a watch, pressing cutters to work faster while they increased the pace of the production chain. The speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time, Sinclair wrote, but his readers were less concerned by the dehumanizing treatment of workers or the inhumane handling of livestock than the possible contamination of their meat. When President Theodore Roosevelt took up the cause of reform, Sinclair wrote, it was not because the public cared anything about the sufferings of these workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.

As a consequence, after the Supreme Court ruled in Swift & Co. v. United States that the federal government had antitrust jurisdiction over the interstate activities of big packers, Congress used that power to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906measures aimed at consumer protectionbut did nothing to reform labor practices in the packinghouses. Sinclair complained that the new laws were written by the packers and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers. Nothing would be truly reformed, least of all for workers. Theodore Roosevelt, among other influential critics, dismissed Sinclairs complaints as hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful because they failed, as Roosevelt derisively put it, to consider the marvelous business efficiency of the big packers. The Jungle caused the whitewashing of some packing-house walls, Sinclair wrote in 1920, but it left the wage-slaves in those huge brick packing-boxes exactly where they were before.

By then, the Federal Trade Commission had concluded a new investigation of the big packersa two-year inquiry ordered by President Woodrow Wilson to ascertain the facts bearing on the alleged violations of the anti-trust acts, and particularly upon the question whether there are manipulations, controls, trusts, combinations, or restraints out of harmony with the law or the public interest. In damning detail, the commission concluded that the big packers not only had a monopolistic control over the American meat industry but also were moving fast into eggs, cheese, fish, and vegetable oil. And they were trying to take over not only nearly every kind of foodstuff but also control of supporting industriesstockyards, shipping and refrigeration cars, cold storage, and warehouses. Elaborate steps have been taken to disguise their real relations by maintaining a show of intense competition, the report concludedbut by maintaining two-thirds to three-quarters control of all markets, the big packers were able to effectively restrain free trade by colluding against farmers and price-fixing to defraud consumers.

Rather than indicting the presidents of the five corporations named in the FTC report, however, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer entered into a landmark consent decree, compelling the meat companies to divest from other food sectors as well as from supporting industries along the supply chain. Congress subsequently passed the Packers and Stockyards Act, legally enshrining that agreement. The arrangement held for 50 years. From 1920 to the present date, concluded a study of deconcentration in the meatpacking industry in 1971, limited ability to use anti-competitive forms of conduct caused the largest companies to lose market shares continually to regional firms in a process that can and should be called market competition. Over that same period, conditions and wages improved considerably for meatpacking workers, livestock farmers and ranchers received increased prices, and the cost of food for consumers actually went down relative to hourly wages. But at precisely the moment that the study appeared, the systematic effort to unravel antitrust measures was beginning.

That transformation was rooted in a philosophy of intentional agricultural overproduction advocated by Earl L. Butz, President Richard Nixons secretary of agriculture. Butz embraced deregulation and market concentration as a way to prop up industrial-scale agriculture, in order to artificially depress food prices worldwidea strategy aimed at increasing American soft power on the world stage. In short order, the federal government went from policing food trusts at home to running an international food ring, intended to undercut our Communist competitors. Ronald Reagans Justice Department fortified this system in the 1980s, when it loosened standards for approving mergers under the 1920 consent decree. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Cargill, Inc. v. Monfort of Colorado, Inc. that demonstrating a price-cost squeeze for farmers or even collusion between packers did not constitute an antitrust monopoly unless their market share were large enough to succeed in a sustained campaign of predatory pricing such that, per the established antitrust standard, competitors actually are driven from the market and competition is thereby lessened.

The effect of these initiatives to tighten top-down market control of the U.S. food supply is hard to overstate. In 1972, there were nearly 3,000 packinghouses operating in the United States. Twenty years later, that number had plummeted to fewer than 200. At the start of the Reagan administration, there were roughly 600,000 hog operations nationwide. Twenty years later, there were only about 80,000 left. And those who managed to hold on were often in desperate shape. By 2001, an estimated 71 percent of chicken farmers were at or below the poverty line. Eventually, those farmers started filing antitrust suits under the Packers and Stockyards Act, and the 2008 Farm Bill required federal regulators to revisit the standards for antitrust enforcement in the food economy. The DOJ and the USDA held joint hearings and proposed rule changes to make it easier for farmers to sue over anti-competitive practices and antitrust market advantages. But the meat and poultry industry successfully lobbied to remove language from the rule about price-fixing, and Congress defunded implementation of the change through an appropriations riderand has repeatedly done so ever since. Only when the Organization for Competitive Markets, a livestock farmer advocacy group, filed suit against the Trump USDA did the DOJ finally agree to investigate unfair practices and undue influences in the meat industry before the end of 2020.

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Beyond Big Meat - The New Republic