COWBOYS VERSUS MEATPACKERS: THE LAST ROUNDUP - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 95

are fed from a mechanized feed delivery system or a trough that can be filled by a tractor. The cattle stand
without shelter, shade, or grass and sleep on their own waste, which forms a concrete-like surface that is
dusty when it's dry and sewer-like if it rains. The cattle are squeezed together tightly so that no calories are
lost to unnecessary movement.
Cattle spend up to six months eating a feed mixture that contains corn byproducts derived from ethanol
production, animal by-products, cottonseed meal, grains, and alfalfa. The purpose of the high-calorie diet
is to create fat deposits known as marbling—the source of flavor and a tender texture in steak.
As feedlots have gotten much larger, they have formed partnerships with or are owned by meatpackers
such as Tyson Foods and JBS, the Brazilian meat giant. They marketed most of the nation's beef cattle. 4
Now the largest beef feedlots finish the vast majority of beef cattle. In 2008, the largest 12 percent each
finished more than sixteen thousand and marketed nearly three quarters of all cattle. 5
In a 2010 analysis of the latest agricultural census data, Food & Water Watch found that the number of
beef cattle on feedlots larger than five hundred head had risen to 13.5 million in 2007, adding about 1,100
every day for five years. The five states with the largest inventories on feedlots all have more than a million
factory-farmed beef cattle. In Texas the average is over twenty thousand head. In California, Oklahoma,
and Washington, it is over twelve thousand.
Unfortunately, more than a hundred years after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle the meatpacking in-
dustry's disregard for workers, consumers, and livestock has not changed. In 1906 Sinclair wrote his novel
to expose the mistreatment of immigrants in Chicago, using the stockyards as a backdrop. He is famously
quoted as saying, “I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit in the stomach.” Sinclair had spent
several weeks doing undercover work at a meatpacking plant, where he experienced the horrible working
conditions and witnessed the abusive labor practices, the exploitation of children, and unspeakable filth.
One of the most attention-grabbing scenes was when workers fell into rendering tanks along with parts of
animals and were ground up and sold as lard. As a result of the public outcry, the Pure Food and Drugs Act
of 1906 was passed.
However, the market power of the five companies that controlled 60 percent of the industry at that time
was a problem. In 1919, the FTC completed a report originally requested by President Woodrow Wilson
that showed there was no competition in the meat industry and that it needed to be dramatically restruc-
tured. It showed there was a lack of competition in both the purchase of livestock and the sale of fresh
meat.
In 1921 Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act (P&SA), a law designed to restore competition
and fair trade practice to meatpacking. At that time, the big five—Swift, Armour, Cudahy, Wilson, and
Morris—had become the big four because Morris merged with Armour. The Packers and Stockyard Ad-
ministration (PSA), now called the Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), was
formed after passage of the law to regulate livestock marketing activities at public stockyards and the op-
erations of meatpackers and live poultry dealers.
The USDA-enforced PSA was designed to prevent meatpackers and processors from using unfair, de-
ceptive, or unjustified discriminatory practices against producers. PSA also bars anticompetitive actions
such as manipulating or controlling prices, creating monopolies, and conspiring to allocate territory or
sales. USDA's enforcement of the PSA against meatpackers and processors has been uneven and limited,
and some provisions of the act have never been implemented—almost one hundred years later.
Although the power of the meatpacker was weakened for about twenty years, during which more than
two thousand small meatpackers operated, after World War II many small retail food stores with their own
butcher shops were forced out of business as large grocery store chains emerged. Then, as fast-food chains
became the largest purchasers of beef, the meatpacking industry began to consolidate again.