livestock
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Don Tyson details plans to export the U.S. meat model to global south
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —– A handful of large companies [PDF] dominate the U.S. meat industry. The biggest of all (besides Cargill whose interests extend well beyond meat) is Tyson Foods, one of the two largest beef packers, the second-largest pork packer, and the […]
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Consolidation in the beef industry has gotten too intense even for the Bush DOJ
Way back in March, Brazilian beef-packing behemoth JBS finished an extraordinary lunge into the U.S. market, having snapped up Swift, National Beef Packing, and the beef assets of Smithfield — the nation’s third-, fourth- and fifth-biggest beef packers. If the deals were approved by U.S. antitrust authorities — and nothing in recent history suggested they […]
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Hog farms can benefit rural agriculture and community
I spent last Thanksgiving on a 320-acre farm in Pocahontas County, Iowa where Jerry Depew grows corn and soybeans, and for more than 10 years, has also raised hogs. Jerry never has more than several hundred hogs at a time, and while this used to be commonplace on Iowa farms, most small and mid-sized hog […]
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The hyper-consolidated poultry industry might consolidate even more
Just four companies — Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms — slaughter and pack nearly 60 percent of the meat-chickens raised in the United States, reported [PDF] the researcher team Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan. That dominance gives these corporate giants what economists call monopsony power — the leverage to dictate to their suppliers […]
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TV queen shows 10 million viewers the dark side of Chicken McNuggets
The chicken industry has had a rough year, its wings clipped by pricey feed, reduced demand, and financial trouble. Even after a recent rally, Pilgrim’s Pride — which slaughters and packs 24 percent of U.S. chicken — has seen its share price plunge nearly 90 percent. As if the industry didn’t have enough to squawk […]
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Old breeds, new ideas are helping small farms
I just returned from a 10 day photo assignment covering the efforts of Heifer Project — Poland to return heritage/locally-adapted breeds of chickens, geese, cattle, and pigs to small farmers struggling to keep a foothold in this changing country. These breeds in many cases are already making a difference. One of these, the Polish Red […]
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Methane digesters make dairy good sense
When Shawn Saylor was in high school, he built a science-fair-sized solar-powered home, complete with tiny solar cells and working lights. (He got an A.) These days, Saylor is a fourth-generation dairy farmer working on an entirely different renewable energy project. The Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farm in Rockwood, Pennsylvania, produces some 6,000 gallons of milk […]
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If you can’t stand the smell, tough luck
Duplin County, N.C. stinks. And no wonder. Its human population is just under 50,000 people, but it is also home to 2.2 million [PDF] of North Carolina’s 10 million hogs [PDF]. Last week, I went on a bus tour of Duplin County as a part of the Politics of Food Conference to see how confined […]
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The Environment Report naively pushes Monsanto-related study praising rBGH
I don’t know much about Environment Report, a non-profit producer of radio reports about, uh, the environment. But I can’t say I’m impressed by its recent piece on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the genetically modified "feed enhancer" for dairy cows that Monsanto recently sold to Eli Lilly. In it (transcript here), reporter Shawn Allee […]
