Glenn Beck Covers the Beef Market Crisis the Way Ag Media Should
By Jim Mundorf
I’ll admit it, I might be a little bit biased here. On Tuesday Morning Glenn Beck played 2 minutes of my YouTube video explaining how large beef packers illegally control the supply of beef to increase their profits, but he also followed that up by talking to a small local butcher who called in. He then talked to a salesman for a feed wagon company. He then spent around 12 minutes interviewing Steve Stratford. Steve is an order buyer at Pratt Livestock and also sells his own purebred Angus bulls. Steve did a great job informing Glenn and the listeners about what exactly is going on in the cattle industry right now. Glenn spent the majority of his second hour trying to learn and inform his audience about why beef prices are so high and why cattle producers are getting none of the profits. He did this by reaching out to Steve, someone who has spent his life making a living in the cattle business. Someone who’s income completely depends on the success of small independent cattlemen.
Click here to listen to Tuesdays show. Scroll to 1:06 to here the beef market discussion.
This reminded me of the exact opposite way that some agriculture media companies have covered the cattle markets in the past couple years. Instead of going out and finding someone with actual skin in the game. Someone who actually makes their living selling these animals. They go straight to some expert that is funded by the beef industry to tell the producers to shut the hell up. The greatest example of this is a report that was made in October of 2019, almost 3 months after the Holcomb Kansas beef packing plant fire.
The Holcomb plant fire was where beef packers learned that if they have some sort of excuse they can easily get away with screwing over both the consumer and the producer. After the fire they let everyone think they weren’t going to be able to process as many cattle and would have less of a supply of beef. This drove cattle prices down and beef prices up, leaving them with a fat profit margin in the middle. When the smoke cleared what actually happened was that packers realized they were making insane margins and they did all they could to increase processing. It was reported that after the fire they were actually processing more cattle than they were before the fire. What packers also learned is that they can screw the producers for a long period of time and those working in ag media will do all they can to cover their tracks for them. In the Farm Report video that is linked below, they pretend to report on cattle producers’ reaction to the fire and the markets. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find one single person who makes their living raising cattle, so instead they had to interview three college professors, a beef industry lobbyist, and a beef magazine editor, all of which amazingly had the same reaction, and that was that this was no big deal and the packers did nothing wrong. I remembered this video because of how pissed I was about it at the time. Watching it now after this scenario has happened over and over again, it is just laughable what a bunch of bought off hacks these people look like.
Click here to view the U.S. Farm Report from Oct 2019
The contrast in these two reports couldn’t be clearer. I don’t care what anyone thinks of Beck’s politics, what he did yesterday is simply try to inform himself and his audience why their food is so expensive, so he reached out to someone who makes his living in the cattle industry. The other report is desperately trying to cover up corporate market manipulation so they make sure not to have guests on that are directly impacted by this, but instead reach out to those that they know will help in the cover up.
Unfortunately, the worst part of all this is that the people raising cattle in this country are forced to finance programs like this. I would be willing to bet everyone in that video making excuses for beef packers has directly benefited from cattle producers checkoff dollars. The beef checkoff is ran by the NCBA who lobbies for the beef packers. They also buy a lot of advertising in ag media. The college professors receive research grants from the checkoff, and because the checkoff is ran by a beef industry lobbying association they are sure to not upset that applecart. If you are tired of your checkoff dollars going to these bought off hack jobs click here checkoffvote.com and sign the petition for a checkoff referendum.
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Jim Mundorf- Owner of Lonesome Lands and The Drover House. He also works on his families farm and cattle ranch in Iowa
