Colorado Event
Push Is On to Get Ranchers, Rural Americans to Crowd Fort Collins Livestock Meeting
Bill Bullard is a man on a mission to get 25,000 to Colorado to send a message to the Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of Justice. That message: More competition in the cattle industry.By Jule Banville, 8-18-10
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| Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF, has been barnstorming to beef up attendance at next week's workshop. Will he succeed? Watch for reports from the ground on NewWest.Net and DailyYonder.Com. | |
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Billings-based R-CALF has ambitions. The association that backs cattle-raisers is urging people to get to Fort Collins, Colo., on Aug. 27th for “the largest gathering of rural Americans in the history of the United States.”
The big deal is a federal-level workshop about competition in the cattle industry. It’s being hosted at Colorado State University by both the Dept. of Agriculture and the Dept. of Justice, which has lately expressed a willing ear on accusations of meatpacking monopolies.
To get the word out, R-CALF’s cowboy-hat-wearin’ CEO, Bill Bullard, has been traveling the country, preaching to anyone who will listen about the degradation of the cattle industry and the importance of the Fort Collins event. NewWest caught up with him “somewhere in southwest Minnesota.” He’d recently left Redwood Falls, MN, and planned to be in D.C. tomorrow. Before that, he’d been stomping around Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming as he attempts to get 25,000 people to the one-day conference he calls “unprecedented.”
The U.S. Attorney General and the Secretary of Agriculture “are not coming to Fort Collins to determine if a problems exists. It’s the reason they’re holding the meeting in the first place,” says Bullard.
What will send the message about the need for competition and a crackdown on violators of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 is numbers. Bullard attended a field hearing in advance of this conference about two months ago in Iowa. About 800 joined him “and that certainly did not send a mandate to Washington,” he says.
Buses are being chartered from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska. In addition, Bullard says he knows of carpools and vanpools coming from Washington state, Mississippi and Louisiana. In Fort Collins, hotels are reportedly booked and campgrounds are filling up.
Why Fort Collins? Bullard’s take is that Ag and DOJ wanted to “come to the center of the United States to express their desire to strike off in a new direction” in regard to managing a livestock industry that has taken serious hits.
In the last 30 years, cattle operations have been reduced by 40 percent. Herd size, says Bullard, is the smallest it’s been since the ‘50s.
So, what are his chances he can actually convince overworked ranchers to get on a bus or a car or even a plane to attend a meeting with the feds when they’ll likely just be one in a crowd? Well, Bullard’s pretty convinced his us-vs.-them approach will win out. “We can’t outspend them (the major meatpackers). Nor can we outlobby them,” he says. “But we can outnumber them.”
NewWest will collaborate with DailyYonder.com to cover the event. Watch for reports from Fort Collins on Friday, Aug. 27.
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Comments
The misweighing of the livestock was part of a larger fraud on other producers in our geographic area.
Tyson had already been caught in another situation making up the numbers on settlement sheets. They could keep cheating producers out of the value of their livestock if they continued to do this. It was even televised on a local Delmarva station where the lady working for Tyson quit her job and went public over her superiors fudging numbers of the local tournament system to scam local growers.
Now the courts say I have to prove this activity "harms competition" to have a claim and to be compensated when the company retaliates against me for wanting to watch my livestock be weighed?
These new rules by GIPSA stop some of the decisions in the courts that have gone haywire. Meanwhile the AMI and their lobbyists bribe politicians and hire K Street firms to be able to get away with their frauds on producers.
If a producer can't watch his or her livestock get weighed properly and are retaliated because of it and have no protections under the Packers and Stockyards Act, the whole show turns into a greedy scam backed by Orwellian judges who make up excuse after excuse for those paying off politicians and people in power.
The fraud in our complex was like a Ponzi scheme where we were no longer paid on the product we produced, but on whether or not we gave in to extortion by these companies. I should get the same price for the same product as anyone else with the same quality product. The truth was that we couldn't even make sure our livestock was weighed correctly and that the company wasn't perpetuating another fraud on producers like they did in the Delmarva Peninsula.
The Packers and Stockyards Act was clearly meant to prohibit packers from cheating producers. The federal courts have legislated from the bench and read into the law what isn't there. Standard Oil tried this defense with respect to the Sherman Anti trust law. It didn't work for that monopoly then and it shouldn't work for a company that has a monopoly on purchases now.
If they could cheat a family farmer in this manner, what other frauds are federal judges perpetrating with their powers of interpretation of the law? Who is safe from this kind of Orwellian tyranny?
Is any livestock producer safe in these circumstances? Do you have to be married to the boss's daughter or have some other kind of "in" to be treated fairly or do we just need judges to follow the written law and not make it up from the bench?
http://agpolicy.org/weekcol/519.html
A.T. Terry
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