Farm Reform Act a “Direct Attack” on Cattle Production NCBA’s Lane Says
This week New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker re-introduced his Farm System Reform Act, a bill he says would “transform a broken system.” Similar legislation was introduced in the House by Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA). The lawmakers claim the legislation will “create a level playing field” for independent family farms, Drovers’ Greg Henderson reports.
"Economic concentration in agriculture has been hurting our country, especially rural America, for decades,” Booker said. “The top four beef packing companies control nearly 85% of the market. The top four pork packers control 71% of the market. These companies have too much market power, and it comes at the expense of independent family farmers, who earn just 14.3 cents of every dollar spent on food.”
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) was quick to label the bill as “misguided,” and Ethan Lane, NCBA’s vice president of government affairs joined host Chip Flory on AgriTalk to discuss the bill further.
“In the political sphere we talk about astroturf—it's when you set up a group that's supposed to look and feel like something other than what it really is—and you have these family farm action type groups that kind of ride in on bills like this and say, ‘Gosh, this is so great for real small family farms and ranches,’ but they're always funded and staffed by animal rights extremists, and this is the case here as well,” Lane says. “You can't eliminate the feedlot system in the highest quality beef producing system in the world, and the most sustainable system in the world and expect it to survive. This is this is a direct attack on cattle production.”
Getting rid of the feedlot system, and encouraging more grass-fed beef production, won’t result in the same efficiency that we have today, Lane notes.
“There's a lot of great grass-fed beef producers around the country, but we know that the efficiency built into, and the sustainability benefits of our feedlot system, are without equal. It's what allows us to produce the highest quality beef in the world, with the lowest footprint and the best animal rights record along with that. Attacking this system in this way, there's some other pieces in there that are kind of buzz words,” he says.
Those buzzwords include ‘Product of USA” labeling and competition, that are sprinkled throughout the bill, drawing support from some, but the NCBA is fully against it, Lane says.
“A lot of the issues we always talk about whether it's a ‘Product of USA’ labeling or competition or any of those things, they kind of peppered some of that stuff into the bill as well and that's brought some other cattle groups out, kind of tacitly supporting this,” he continues. “We are we are full throated in opposition to this bill. This is being advanced by people who do not have the best interest of cattle country at heart. If you see Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporting a bill to try to save the U. S. Cattle industry, I advise being extremely skeptical of that effort.”
“If you read the material that he’s [Booker] put out, and this is the reintroduction, he introduced in the last Congress as well, it's funny because it's kind of a straw man. He talks about packers and consolidation in the packing space, and some of those issues that obviously
we're all wrestling with, but then his solution to that is to eliminate feedlots,” Lane continues. It's a real straw man argument when you drill down into it, and& it’s playing into some of the emotions that we we know are certainly tangible in cattle country right now. And those are things we're all you know& fighting through and working to fix and address.”
Part of what the NCBA plans to do in response to this bill is education, Lane says.
“Senator Booker and his allies are trying to tie this effort to what the Biden administration did on Friday with their executive order. Those are two very different things. The President's Executive Order is devoting $500 million towards expanded packing capacity, $100 million towards additional inspectors and $55 million towards making sure state inspected facilities can get up to spec. That processing capacity piece, and fixing product of the USA, that's a big issue we've been pushing on. Those are tangible deliverables and very different than what Cory Booker and his allies are trying to do with this with this bill,” Lane explains. “So it's important that folks understand the difference between the two. These aren't the same thing and we need to make sure that that's really, really well understood both on the hill and out in the country.”
For the full conversation, including more about that funding and what a reinvigorated enforcement of the packers and stockyards act could look like, and the “Product of the USA” label changes, listen to the clip below.
