re:form

For the first year of our project, we would illicitly buy raw milk from an older farmer, who fed 50 cows on grass. He told us that 20 years earlier, the lush pastures of his valley had housed more than a dozen dairy farms, all selling to a bottler a few miles away. By the time we met him, long after his neighbors had given in, he was paying to have his milk hauled to the nearest processor, 40 miles away. Then the dairy giant Dean Foods bought the midsize processor the farmer had been selling to, and promptly shut down the (relatively) nearby processing plant. Now the nearest buyer was 70 miles away, and the extra 30 miles of freight, combined with heightened energy costs, wiped out what was left of his profits. The man shut down his dairy operation, telling us he had sold his herd to a large dairy farm in South Carolina. Similarly, today there’s no USDA-inspected slaughterhouse nearby, so livestock growers have to haul their animals a hundred miles and back if they want to sell meat locally.

What had happened to all the community-scale processing facilities that flourished a generation ago? The federal government watched idly, ignoring antitrust principles, while the food industry consolidated dramatically. Today, four companies process 90 percent of the beef consumed in the United States. In dairy, just two companies process nearly 70 percent of the milk produced nationally. As these giant companies scale up and buy competitors, they shutter smaller facilities and concentrate processing in vast factories geared to large-scale farms. In standard antitrust theory, when four players control more than 40 percent of a market, they have untoward power over their suppliers—in this case, farmers. The result has been a nearly wholesale obliteration of small livestock farms, and an explosion in the size of the remaining operations.