Small businesses and family farmers and ranchers — I need not tell some of my Republican friends from those states. Guess what? You got four basic meatpacking facilities. That’s it. You play with them or you don’t get to play at all, and you pay a hell of a lot more, a hell of a lot more because there’s only four.
Given Biden’s incoherence, it’s up to us to make some assumptions about what he meant here. He most likely meant to say there are four major meatpacking companies, not facilities. And given he said four, he probably means beef specifically, not meat in general. The four major beef companies in the U.S. are Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS. If you branch out into other meats, companies such as Smithfield, Hormel, and Perdue are big players as well.
The Big Four beef companies are responsible for about 70 percent of total U.S. beef production. The reason for the consolidation is economies of scale. Larger facilities are able to slaughter more cattle at lower cost than smaller facilities.
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