Building a Better Meat System

Consumers Hold the Key to Building a Better Meat System

All it’s taken to expose the precarious state of our modern industrial meat supply is a tiny bit of infectious genetic material wrapped in a protein coat.

The coronavirus pandemic has shone a not-so-friendly light on the inhumane ways both animals and people are treated in a system dominated by four major companies: Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef. Over the past 40 years, as the meatpacking industry has consolidated in the name of scale, efficiency, and profits—and while consumers have been the beneficiaries of cheap meat—producers, rural communities, slaughterhouse workers, and the environment have all paid a steep price.

As the virus rampaged through enormous packing plants in the Midwest, sickening thousands of mostly immigrant workers and, as of June, killing more than 100, the packers slowed production and claimed a meat shortage was imminent. This sent meat prices soaring and panicked consumers cleaned out grocery store meat cases. In the meantime, decreased packing house capacity meant farmers had nowhere to sell their animals and were forced to exterminate millions, mostly hogs and chickens, the disposal of which (by burying or incineration) has created serious groundwater and air pollution. In the modern industrial system, once animals reach their slaughter weight, there’s no alternative to mass euthanasia and disposal if the facilities aren’t available.

“What do you do with a million cattle and no slaughter capacity? You cannot keep feeding them,” says Mike Callicrate, a rancher in St. Francis, Kansas, who owns a small slaughter plant, along with a processing plant and retail store in Colorado Springs. He’s also a fiercely outspoken advocate for small family farms.

“These companies are so unbelievably fragile. One little thing happens and they fall apart. It's just a house of cards,” he adds.

In the late 1960s, the US was home to around 9,000 medium- and small-scale slaughter plants scattered throughout the country. By 2018, that number had shrunk to about 800, with the vast majority of beef and pork processed in only about a dozen extremely large plants concentrated in the Midwest. Not only does this leave the meat supply vulnerable to disruption, but as small plants have disappeared, it’s become harder for livestock growers to opt-out of the industrial system, and small rural economies have collapsed as competition has disappeared and dollars have been siphoned off by massive corporations.

Callicrate places many of the problems inherent in the commodity meat system at the foot of the USDA for several reasons—especially when it comes to truth in labeling, another issue depressing prospects for small producers. “We've got USDA out there acting like they're the food police and making sure our food is safe and wholesome, and yet they are complicit in one of the biggest labeling frauds in our history: ‘Product of USA,’” he says. “We’ve got to realize that USDA does not represent the people's interest anymore.”

Consumers may think they’re buying American beef when they read ”Product of USA” on the label, but meat can legally carry that terminology even if it’s imported from countries like Australia or Brazil, as long as it’s processed in a US packing plant. The misleading product of the USA label goes hand in hand with the end of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for beef. When Congress allowed the industry to drop the country of origin from the label in 2015, the doors opened wide for consumer confusion, especially with grass-fed beef.

“The USDA rule that allows multinational corporations to shop for grass-fed beef in the cheapest markets in the world and then sell it to the most lucrative market in the world (the US) and call it a product of the USA is a major issue,” says Will Harris. He’s the fourth-generation owner of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. In the mid-90s, he began transitioning his commodity cattle operation to a pasture-based, multi-species model, and now is vertically integrated, with two slaughter plants and a robust sales and marketing department that moves product through several different sales channels, including retail, foodservice, and direct-to-consumer.

In the years since COOL ended, Harris says he’s seen his business revenues drop almost 25 percent. “We’re selling the same amount of beef,” he says, “but our margins are dropping because we’re competing with cheaper meat from other countries.”