Kansas cattle rancher Kyle Hemmert watches the decline of cattle farmers in Ireland and the Netherlands and sees the future for himself and his fellow ranchers.
“What’s happening in the beef industry is the same thing that’s happened in the sheep industry,” Mr. Hemmert told The Epoch Times. “America peaked at 51 million sheep; today, we have less than 5 million.
“I’m seeing empty pastures in my area,” he said. “People said ‘to hell with it.’”
Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF USA, spoke to The Epoch Times about the issue.
“The cattle industry is the last frontier; it’s the last segment of the livestock industry that still has a sufficient level of competition to sustain independent producers,” Mr. Bullard said.
With about 5,000 members, R-CALF represents independent cattle ranchers and is fighting to preserve their independence. But they are facing off against a group of only four major buyers for their cows, new federal initiatives that favor the large packing companies, and climate activism that claims cows emit too many greenhouse gasses and must have their numbers reduced.
“The model that they have applied, first to the poultry industry and now to the hog industry, has been extremely successful for the multinational meat packers that want to vertically integrate the entire industry,” Mr. Bullard said, “and that vertical integration kills competition.”
The cash markets that once existed between buyers and sellers in these industries are largely gone, with farmers becoming either employees or working under contract to packing companies.
“Now, if you want to produce hogs, you do so by invitation from an integrator because you have a contract to produce hogs,” Mr. Bullard said. “They’re applying that, unfortunately, very successful model to the cattle industry right now.”
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) has also commented on the issue.
“That’s the example of vertical integration that’s already happened in large part with our pork producers and our poultry producers,” Ms. Hageman told The Epoch Times. “And they want to do exactly the same thing with our ranches. They want to basically make our ranchers nothing but paid employees, and the ranches and the real property would be owned by the big packers.”
South Dakota rancher Brett Kenzy told The Epoch Times that the American rancher is a remnant of a “self-reliant, independent, entrepreneurial, hardworking, religious, multigenerational person that used to be very commonplace.”
Ranchers now worry that having so much of the country’s meat production under the control of a handful of corporations will drive many farmers out of business and leave Americans at the mercy of a few global players.
The Miracle of Cows
“The miracle of the cow is the fact that she has four chambers in her stomach, and she can eat grass, which is carbohydrate, and create protein,” Mr. Kenzy said. “They’re the only animal on earth that can do it that efficiently.
“Beef is the most well-balanced source for human beings in terms of vitamins, minerals and protein,” he said, “but that four-chambered stomach, as they’re running it through, they belch methane.”
These methane emissions have put cows directly in the crosshairs of climate activists. Many of the corporations that control food markets have joined net-zero clubs like Climate Action 100+, which pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions for themselves and their suppliers.
“Rather than just killing off the cattle all at once, this is going to be a controlled implosion of the beef industry,” Mr. Kenzy said. “I think the end goal is ultimately controlling the food supply.”
Cattle ranchers “went through a period from 2015 to 2021 where they could not recover their cost of production,” Mr. Bullard said. “We’ve seen segments of our industry literally drop like flies.”
“Just four decades ago, we had about 1.3 million independent cattle farmers and ranchers that were maintaining mother cow herds and raising calves each year,” Mr. Bullard said. “Due to economic costs, price squeezes, a lack of profitability, and a lack of competition [among buyers], we wiped out 43 percent of them.”
American households have experienced this phenomenon in the form of escalating prices for beef. The average price that American consumers paid for beef increased from $3.89 per pound in January 2020 to $5.10 per pound as of July 2023, according to the Federal Reserve.
“The fact that cattle producers were receiving seriously depressed prices for the cattle, at the same time that consumers were paying super inflated prices for beef in the grocery store, that prompted us to file a national class action suit against the largest four packers that control 85 percent of the fed cattle market,” Mr. Bullard said.
It is only recently that these price increases made their way through to the ranchers that remained in business.
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“This year is going to be profitable for the cow-calf man, but for the last six, seven years there has not been profit,” Mr. Hemmert said. “When there’s not profit, it signals to the industry to cut back, quit producing, and there’s been a lot of cow herds that have been sold.”
“It took decimation of the cow-calf industry to make us profitable again,” he said. “That’s kind of sad, right?”
The Problem With Cows
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization asserts that emissions from livestock farms are about seven gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, or about 15 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions (pdf).
“Beef and cattle milk production account for the majority of emissions, respectively contributing 41 and 20 percent of the sector’s emissions,” the U.N. states.
The solution proposed by climate activists is to reduce the production of beef, with a target of 30 percent reduction in cattle herds. Countries like Ireland and the Netherlands have already attempted to introduce laws and regulations to cut herds.
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency released a 13-year, 25-billion-euro plan in December 2021 to reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2030. The plan would cut the country’s cattle, pig, and chicken population by 30 percent through voluntary buy-outs or, if necessary, expropriations by the state of about 3,000 farms.
In May, the European Union green-lit a Dutch plan to spend $1.6 billion to purchase or seize Dutch farmers’ land. This policy led to mass farmer protests under slogans like “No Farmers, No Food.”
In the United States, however, targets to reduce livestock emissions are being set not by government fiat but by a handful of corporate food producers.
In June 2021, Tyson Foods announced that it was “the first U.S.-based protein company to have an emissions reduction target approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).”
Tyson is one of the four dominant packing companies in the beef industry; the other three are Minnesota-based Cargill, and Brazilian-based JBS Foods and Marfrig. Together these four companies process about 85 percent of all beef in the United States.
And it is not just the packing oligopoly that is expanding its control into the ranching industry. A similar consolidation and vertical integration is happening within global grocery chains as well.
“Walmart has gone out and bought enormous ranches,” Ms. Hageman said. “They’re raising their own cattle, they’re processing it, and they’re selling it in their stores.”
‘Rich Countries Must Cut Meat Consumption’
The North American Meat Institute, whose members include meat packing companies that account for more than 95 percent of America’s meat and poultry products, launched its Protein PACT Academic Advisory Council in June, which works with its members “in setting greenhouse gas reduction targets to be approved by the Science Based Targets initiative.”
The SBTi, in partnership with organizations like the United Nations Global Compact and the World Wildlife Fund, pledges to “lead the way to a zero-carbon economy, boost innovation and drive sustainable growth by setting ambitious, science-based emissions reduction targets.” Calling itself the “global body enabling businesses to set emissions reduction targets in line with science,” the SBTi states that “companies in the forest, land and agriculture sectors will reduce at least 72% of emissions by no later than 2050.”
Tyson foods stated in its 2021 Sustainability Report that it had a “Science Based Target” of achieving a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and that addressing beef production would be key.
Despite the fact that greenhouse has emissions are a global phenomenon, emissions reduction plans typically focus on western countries. A 2022 report by Earth.org stated that in order to meet climate-change targets, “rich countries must cut meat consumption by at least 75%.”
A 2018 study published in Nature (pdf) claimed that beef consumption in western countries would need to decrease by 90 percent.
As cows become a prime target for climate activists, it is perhaps not coincidental that cattle ranchers are also the last livestock farmers who have not already been absorbed by global food conglomerates.
“Cattle is the single largest segment of American agriculture; it sets itself apart from the hog and poultry industries,” Mr. Bullard said. “The hog and poultry industry are primarily controlled by multinational meatpacking conglomerates, and they have the ability to defend their interests, unlike the disaggregated independent family farmers and ranchers scattered across the country.
“They simply don’t have the resources to fight back,” he said. “What the climate change folks have done is pick the low-hanging fruit, and that’s the U.S. cattle industry.”
Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef
Like with other segments of the world’s economy, the environmental social and governance (ESG) movement has made its way into food production as well. One of the key organizations in this effort is the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB).
The GRSB is an international organization with representatives from 24 countries, whose mission is “the advancement of sustainability in the global beef value chain.” Its members include three of the four dominant meat packers: Tyson Foods, JBS, and Cargill.
In 2021, the GRSB announced its commitment to “reduce the net global warming impact of beef 30% by 2030 through global sustainability goals.”
“The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef is perpetuating this globalism, where the standards are being set, not in the United States, but globally,” Mr. Bullard said. “They are dictating standards to producers, and they are able to enforce those standards by limiting access to the marketplace because GRSB consists of the world’s largest meat packers.
“But the standards are arbitrary in terms of how it affects the quality and safety of the meat that’s produced,” he said.
A Highly Segmented Industry
There are three stages to cattle production, which are often conducted by separate farms, and which have made the industry more difficult to vertically integrate. The first, called the cow-calf producer, maintains a mother cow herd and typically produces one calf each year per mother cow.
The second stage is the background stage, where calves from about six months old are fed a growing ration until they are about 1 year old and weigh about 900 pounds. The third stage are feedlots, where cows are fattened for slaughter, generally by grazing.
“We’re a highly segmented industry,” Mr. Kenzy said. “That’s why we’ve been so hard to capture.”
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In the past, the stages of raising cattle featured arms-length transactions in which prices were set by supply and demand, as well as the quality of the ranchers’ cattle.
“The feedlot industry has become really concentrated in itself,” Mr. Hemmert said. “These huge feed yards have made these captive supply agreements with one of the four major packers to get all their cattle.”
USDA Interfering
The Biden administration’s actions regarding consolidation of the beef industry have been mixed.
On the one hand, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a $1 billion program to fund new processing facilities, including a $962,954 grant to Benson & Turner Foods Inc. to build a cattle and hog processing plant on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
On the other hand, the USDA is currently attempting to mandate that cattle ranchers attach radio-frequency identification tags (RFIDs) to their cattle in order to “track animals from birth to slaughter,” the American Veterinary Medical Association said.
The USDA claims this is for the purpose of tracking diseases, but many ranchers say it will be a prohibitive expense, particularly for smaller farmers.
“The driving force behind it is they want it for exports and they want it to benefit the multinational meat packers,” Mr. Bullard said. “If there’s a disease outbreak in a particular region but they can identify cattle not from that region, they’re able to continue trade uninterrupted, so there’s significant value.
“However, the meat packers don’t want to pay [ranchers] for the added cost of this kind of a program, so they convinced the government to require this to be a mandatory program” that ranchers must pay for, he said.
Others expressed concern that the RFID system will allow the packing conglomerates to impose whatever criteria they come up with on ranchers.
“It’s a way to regulate the production of beef in the name of sustainability,” Mr. Kenzy said, “basically registering all your cattle with the government.
He added that the Global Roundtable will ultimately tell ranchers how to graze, breed, and feed their cattle, rather than the market.
“This really isn’t about traceability or identification,” Ms. Hageman said. “We have a very robust identification and traceability system already in effect and working in the United States, and it’s worked for a long, long time.
“This is another form of surveillance,” she said, “and as we’ve seen by the federal government over the last couple of years, our government really likes to surveil the citizens of this country.
“What ultimately this will lead to is the USDA attempting to dictate operations and management decisions for our individual ranchers,” Ms. Hageman said. “It will also result in the vertical integration of the industry in the same way that they vertically integrated the pork and poultry industries, and it is going to be absolutely cost prohibitive for a lot of our smaller and our independent livestock producers.”
Antitrust Laws Unenforced
Meanwhile, there appears to be little interest within the Biden administration in enforcing antitrust laws in the animal agriculture industry. A relevant law is the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which was written “to assure fair competition and fair trade practices, to safeguard farmers and ranchers, … to protect consumers, … and to protect members of the livestock, meat, and poultry industries from unfair, deceptive, unjustly discriminatory and monopolistic practices,” the USDA states.
“Many people in the USDA abandoned their core mission, which is really protecting our independent producers and our livestock producers, and they have aligned themselves with big business,” Ms. Hageman said.
“We don’t want a monopoly when it comes to food supply, and the fact is that the United States produces the healthiest, highest quality beef of any country in the world,” she said. “You don’t hear about very many instances where there is a problem, and in fact the instances that you do hear about are typically in the processing end of it, not the cattle production end of it.
“Our cattle producers run their operations very well; they take excellent care of their land because they’re dependent on it to make a living,” she said. “They are some of the very best conservationists that there are, in terms of protecting these resources and open spaces.”
Mr. Hemmert, the Kansas cattle rancher, said ranchers can produce more if given the opportunity to be profitable.
“But if you’re not profitable, you’re not going to produce, and your banker is not going to let you,” he said.
Mr. Kenzy spoke of past efforts by the government to decimate a food supply.
“In the 1800s, they killed all the buffalo off in the northern plains, and they did that to eradicate the ability of the Indians to sustain themselves,” Mr. Kenzy said. “And this war on beef, it looks to me like it’s much the same thing.”
The Epoch Times contacted Walmart and Tyson Foods for comment. Walmart did not respond; Tyson food directed us to the reports referenced in this article.
Reuters contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
