The early and mid-70s were a period of explosive growth and high demand for agricultural products, when farmers across the country were experiencing some of the highest relative incomes seen in US agriculture, before or since.ĭuring this time, farmers and ranchers with cash to hand and access to cheap financing were looking to make investments in their agricultural businesses that would improve cashflow. It’s no accident that the 1970s marked the re-ascendance of a concentrated meatpacking industry. What changed? The answer, in part, lies beyond the meatpacking sector, with corn farmers and grocery stores. In the mid-1970s, they controlled as little as 20% of the meatpacking market. In fact, in 2020, many packers were criticised for the amount of meat that was exported at a time when processing was limited due to Covid outbreaks in processing plants, driving up prices and creating shortages at grocery stores that affected US consumers.īut today’s big four didn’t grow into behemoths overnight. They are also multinational giants, two of which are majority-owned by Brazilian companies. Today’s big four – Tyson, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef – are more than just the heirs to the American meatpacking legacy. But eventually the industry would revive the old playbook of earning steep profit through immense scale and labour exploitation, and today, all four of the largest beef processors of Sinclair’s time are still around in some form.įour super-powered meatpackers control more than 80% of the US beef market. This did much to check the power of big packers, Specht says, though labour movements of the 1940s and 50s were just as important. “Big meatpacking was no longer questioned, it was regulated.”Ī third act, passed in 1921, the Packers and Stockyards Act, was specifically intended to break up the vertical integration of the big companies by forcing them to sell off their interests in businesses that owned, for example, railroads or refrigerated trucks. “These acts accepted the state of the meatpacking industry as of 1906,” he writes in his book, Red Meat Republic. Josh Specht, an environmental and business historian, offers another interpretation of this starting point. In the wake of Sinclair’s muckraking exposé on the industry of the time, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, aimed at cleaning up the meat supply for consumer health and challenging the nearly unrestricted power of these players. When explaining the history of consolidation in US meatpacking, it is normal to begin in the age of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.
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