Ranchers accuse meatpackers of price-fixing

Great herds of elk once grazed the rolling grasslands of California’s coast and Sierra foothills. Today, it is cattle grazing on private ranches that preserves 20 million acres of incomparable landscape. The ranches are under pressure from many directions, including the consolidation of the meatpacking industry that has left few options to slaughter cattle in California. Modern packinghouses and feedlots, concentrated east of the Rocky Mountains, have become a symbol of factory farming and have left California ranchers in a pinch because most of the two-dozen major slaughterhouses that existed in California in the 1980s are gone. “We are seeing the toppling of the last critical mass of infrastructure around the country,” said David Evans of Marin Sun Farms, a fourth-generation rancher at Point Reyes Station. Complaints of price collusion are common. One California rancher who would not speak publicly said that when it comes to selling cattle, meatpackers “all want to drink coffee out of the same cup,” each offering ranchers the same low price for their cattle. Meatpacking today is more concentrated than it was in the heyday of Teddy Roosevelt. Four packers — Tyson Foods, Brazilian giant JBS, Cargill and National Beef — control 84 percent of the beef market. The consolidation mirrors a transformation of American agriculture since 1980 in which industrial operations have displaced small, diversified farms...more