Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to
control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to
lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked
.
—James Fenimore Cooper,
The American Democrat
(1838)
The burly cowboy roping cattle on the western range, an American icon immortalized in western movies and
country songs, has just about disappeared from the national landscape. Long marked by violence and law-
lessness—from the range wars of the nineteenth century to the land-grabbing exploits of the western cattle
empires—the U.S. cattle industry has been devastated in more recent decades by a type of economic viol-
ence. The titans of beef have eliminated the cowboy and created a system that pushes independent ranchers
out of business, drives cattle off the range, and creates huge profits for some of the largest corporations in
the country.
Mike Callicrate's blog,
No-Bull Food News
, is an apt description of the outspoken opposition to big ag-
ribusinesses. The owner of Callicrate Cattle, his vocation is fighting for the independent cattle producer.
Callicrate says he was “blacklisted” by the monopolistic beef packers because of his advocacy. In 1996, he
was one of ten ranchers who filed a class-action lawsuit against IBP, the giant meatpacker that merged with
Tyson, for its unfair, deceptive, and discriminatory cattle-buying practices. The case ended when the Su-
preme Court refused to hear the case against IBP. Callicrate continued to criticize the industry voraciously
for its market power, including Farmland National Beef, which retaliated by refusing to purchase his cattle.
Without a market for his cattle, he was forced to close down.
Callicrate, energetic and entrepreneurial, invented a widely used castration device that has provided the
resources for him to circumvent the market power of the meat industry. Undeterred by being driven out of
business, he invested a “few million” into remodeling an existing processing plant and opened Ranch Foods
Direct. A local source of high-quality meat, the company primarily does business in Colorado Springs,
where he distributes beef to more than a hundred restaurants.
Callicrate concedes that most ranchers do not have this option, because they have no way to slaughter
and market their beef. Unless a rancher can sell a quarter or half of its beef to a consumer, it is hard to make
a profit selling direct. Most consumers do not want to store this much beef and they are only interested in
steaks and good-quality roasts, not all of the pounds of hamburger that come from purchasing part of a cow.
To mitigate this problem Callicrate has been involved in developing and promoting mobile slaughter units
that can be used on-site at farms. But he believes the only way that independent ranching can continue is if
the government begins enforcing antitrust laws. He explains that ranchers face untold obstacles to making a
living. Cattle used to be sold at a competitive live auction, where the big meatpackers had to compete with
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