Blaine Higgs Gonzo! Lesson for Moe.

[chuckChuck]

Ritz the Minister of Agriculture and Food who made a public joke about the listeria deaths in 2008?

Ritz fretted about the political dangers of the crisis, before quipping "This is like a death by a thousand cuts. Or should I say cold cuts." An embarrassing insensitive blunder that showed his true colours. Calls for his resignation were ignored.

Way to go Gerry! 17 listeriosis deaths across the country under your watch and you make a joke about it? LOL

Yeah Ritz the SOB was a real winner and a liar who was too chicken to put the CWB issue to a farmer vote which was promised. Because he knew he would lose.

But he had no trouble supporting the much more rigid and restrictive "socialist" supply managed marketing boards for poultry, dairy and eggs. All the while claiming he was bringing farmers marketing freedom!

The irony runs deep in the CPC and amongst the farmers for just us!

And Willy I wasn't at any candidate's forum calling Ritz a SOB. Even though I agree with who ever did.

[WiltonRanch]

Oh sure Chuck you weren’t there. We will go with that one. ????

[chuckChuck]

Stick to irrelevant nit picking stupid speculation Willy!

To avoid answering the hard questions! LOL

[WiltonRanch]

Stick to irrelevant nit picking stupid speculation Willy!

To avoid answering the hard questions! LOL

It’s not nit picking it’s stating facts. You deny who you are here but your account has been here for many years with a trail of evidence. Even with your tirade of hate against Gerry Ritz further indicates you are who we say you are. But I digress.

Some of how things were handled with the ag file was not perfect. The transition to an open market could have been handled better. Did a majority wish to keep a single desk, and was a majority vote truly needed to decide whether an act in parliament be abolished when originally was instated through a non plebiscite? I imagine the same scenario would hold true with the Indian Act. Probably enough natives would like to see it stay to keep the status quo but also a lot would like to see a change. When all you know is what you’ve lived sometimes you suffer from Stockholm syndrome. Even with cutting the pfra I thought was a poor move but realistically did it matter being cut? Think the worst was cutting out government plant breeding and cooperative research. Non biased, non corporate fingers in breeding and data is money better spent than propping up a pasture model which doesn’t make economic sense or benefit the whole industry.

[chuckChuck]

You wanted marketing freedom, but every Conservative government supports government controlled and mandated supply management marketing boards just like Ritz and Harper? Huh?

How does as Conservative justify that twisted pretzel of a policy?

Ritz handed our grain industry to the oligopoly that keeps shrinking! Way to go dumbass!

And the cattle industry has been accused and is guilty of price fixing and manipulation for decades too.

But you still naively believe in marketing freedom? LOL

[blackpowder]

All I can say is WOW.

The exposure to ignorance, fear and hate since the Internet really has gone from 0-100 in one generation.

There'd be no Agriville without Chuck but that doesn't mean I have to wade through it.

Rewriting history usually a dismal career choice. But it seems to suit you very well. Good luck.

[chuckChuck]

So are you happy with a couple of companies dominating and manipulating the cattle market?

And happy with an ever shrinking oligopoly of multinational grain companies?

U.S. meat packing sector tightens its grip on cattle markets

By Alan Guebert ([url]https://www.producer.com/contributor/alan-guebert/[/url])


Reading Time: 3 minutes
Published: May 26, 2022
Opinion ([url]https://www.producer.com/opinion/[/url])


The Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act, hopes to establish “minimums for negotiated sales and require clear reporting of marketing contracts to ensure ranchers are getting a fair shake in a highly consolidated cattle market.” a vegan to know that livestock and poultry aren’t “harvested,” the squeaky clean verb that’s become fashionable among farm and ranch groups to minimize the end — as in, The End —of most animals their members raise.
Soybeans are harvested; pigs are slaughtered. Wheat is harvested; cattle are slaughtered.
It’s not a minor point, insists C. Robert Taylor, eminent scholar of agricultural economics and public policy at Auburn University, in his recently released treatise on today’s badly broken cattle markets.

Taylor telegraphs the paper’s theme through its title, Harvested Cattle, Slaughtered Markets?
The semantic sarcasm isn’t accidental. While American farm and commodity groups spent decades polishing meat’s image with terms like “harvesting,” global agribusiness spent its time and resources buying up, then dominating — ahem, slaughtering — farm and food sectors such as seed, cattle, poultry, and grocery retailing.

Now, one market, cattle, is so near death that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives agriculture committees recently held hearings to push ideas on how to resuscitate it.

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Two plans were showcased. The first “would create a new U.S. Department of Agriculture office to monitor for anti-competitive practices in the meat and poultry industries,” reported the Washington Post April 27.
The second, labelled the Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act, hopes to establish “minimums for negotiated sales and require clear reporting of marketing contracts to ensure ranchers are getting a fair shake in a highly consolidated cattle market.”

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Either or both ideas may have had merit 20 years ago when it was already evident that major meat packers were tightening their grip on cattle markets. Today, however, both plans are window dressing from late-to-the-party politicians. Neither will have a nickel’s worth of impact on prices paid by packers for cattle or for altering any “anti-competitive practices in the meat and poultry industries,” says Taylor.

Why? Because, as his readable, 49-page report makes clear, major packers long ago learned how to minimize competition in the live cattle market while maximizing confusion over today’s USDA maze of reporting requirements. The data bears witness to their ever-growing prowess at the expense of cattle growers and consumers.
Over the last two decades, Taylor writes, “retail beef prices in constant dollars have trended strongly upward… from about $500/cwt (per hundredweight) to over $700/cwt…. Grocery store profitability has also trended upward, about doubling in the last three decades…

“Profitability of independent cattle feeding has trended downward… from an average profit of $50/head to an average loss of $50/head.”

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Moreover, these “sustained financial losses for independent feeders likely explain, in part or in whole, the loss of 83,000 feedlots with a thousand or fewer head capacity in 25 years and 48,000 in the last decade” alone.
These feedlots’ get-out-while-you-can math was simple, offers Taylor. The $50-per-head loss they faced in just the past decade alone would have totalled a devastating $1.5 million-per-feeder had they stayed.
Somehow, though, the uber-big feeders escaped similar losses and a similar fate. The number of feedlots with more than 50,000 head capacity actually increased from 45 in the late 1990s to 77 today. How?
“Sweetheart deals with large captive feeders” — independent feedlots contractually tied to one of the big four packers — “may explain, in part or in whole, how they have survived and even (grew) in the last decade…. Publicly available data on costs or returns for giant feedlots are not available to address this question.”
If neither congressional effort holds little to no hope to even partially repair today’s broken cattle market, what might?
Taylor offers four “options for further discussion.” All hold some merit, he explained in a May 9 telephone interview, but also, all require a level of government intervention that hasn’t been seen in most ag markets for decades.
“The bottom line,” Taylor says, “is that after decades of watching cattle markets become more integrated with meat packers and meat retailers, I don’t have a good solution that’s politically workable.”
Bottom line? If the experts say it’s slaughter, it’s slaughter.
Alan Guebert is an agricultural commentator from Illinois.


?

[cropgrower]

just one more and you will have a full page of nonsense

[cropgrower]

and when bill 293 is passed all what you are ranting about is just a bit of hot air cc , government can come in and shut you down and take your herd etc , what is NFU s position on 293 ?

[chuckChuck]

Are you having trouble keeping up Crop?

Since you got all day to respond and some of us like to get some work done, what are you complaining about?

Ask the NFU about 293 instead of whining about it me.

And are you happy with anti competitive behaviour of the meat packers there Crop? Or you got nothing to say on that expensive duopoly that costs producers a lot of money?