Chapter+6

On the Range A New Trust The Breasts of Mr. McDonald Captives The Threat of Wealthy Neighbors A Broken Link
 * Hank, 42 years old and ruggedly handsome, is a prominent rancher in Colorado Springs who gives Eric Schlosser a tour.
 * They pass houses in a subdivision built on land where cattle once grazed are highly susceptible to forest fires, although beautiful.
 * Hanks is trying to connect environmentalists and ranchers in order to save the ranch land and unify enemies; “Nature isn’t an abstraction for me.”
 * Hank introduces Schlosser to his wife, Susan, and daughters, Allie, 6, and Kris, 8.
 * They go on a tour of their land in the family minivan.
 * Hank allows his cattle to graze in 35 separate pastures and rotates the feeding location every week and a half to avoid overgrazing, keeping his grass lush and his stream well-kept.
 * He then takes Schlosser to Fountain Creek, which is eroded and ugly due to lack of planning and storm runoff from the poorly planned Colorado Springs.
 * Hank tells Schlosser about all the environmental groups he has helped organize.
 * Hank follows a herd of antelope, driving the minivan over the prairie in pursuit, and then drives up a hill to show Schlosser a newly-built racetrack for stock car racing.
 * The speedway holds races every weekend and practice runs during the week which interrupts the peace of the landscape.
 * As they drive away, Hank’s daughters chat in the van, oblivious to the problems.
 * Ranchers, the personification of the American West, have seen their numbers decrease by half a million in the last 20 years, and the remaining are faring poorly.
 * Rising land prices, stagnant beef prices, oversupplies of cattle, increased shipments of lve cattle from Canada and Mexico, development pressures, inheritance taxes, and health scares about beef all threaten ranchers.
 * Corporations buy large amounts of meat from single meatpackers, giving them a stranglehold and pushing toward a range war.
 * A century ago, legislation such as the Sherman Antitrust Act broke up corporate trusts and investigations caused them to disband.
 * Congress then created the Packers and Stockyards Administration, which prevented price-fixing and monopolistic behavior in the beef industry.
 * That worked well until the Reagan Administration, which allowed beef firms to merge; now the top 4 beef firs (ConAgra, IBP, Excel, and National Beef) slaughter 84% of the nation’s cattle.
 * Meatpackers use their private supplies of cattle to keep prices low and hide the actual prices being paid from independent ranchers.
 * The analogy to the New York Stock Exchange is made: “A free market requires many buyers as well as many sellers, all with equal access to accurate information, all entitled to trade on the same terms, and none with a big enough share of the market to influence price. Nothing close to these conditions now exists in the cattle market.” (1380
 * Meatpacking companies pay and control feedlot owners instead of going through the hassle of owning their own feedlots.
 * The beef industry is turning into the poultry industry, which has turned chicken farmers in the South into desperate serfs.
 * This has largely been caused by the Chicken McNugget.
 * Due to the post-World War II decrease in chicken prices, McDonald’s decided to create a sensible chicken snack. The initial testing went so well that McDonald’s enlisted Tyson Foods to help the supply.
 * They created a new breed of chicken with unusually large breasts: Mr. McDonald.
 * Although popular (McDonald’s was now the second largest chicken buyer after KFC), the Chicken McNugget contains twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.
 * The Chicken McNugget changed the poultry industry: more chicken is now sold than beef, 90% of chicken sold is cut, not whole, and Tyson is the world’s largest chicken processor.
 * Tyson supplies growers with day-old chicks and takes them back seven weeks later, leaving all the risk to the grower.
 * Chicken growers have to pay to build the houses and make only about 12,000 dollars a year, frequently quitting after three years, which leaves them in major debt.
 * Since poultry contracts are short-term, growers can be dropped by major processors if they try to speak out, causing major financial consequences for protesting.
 * Contracts frequently include clauses preventing growers from filing lawsuits of joining bargaining units.
 * Since the decline of beef in the 1970s, ranchers have been losing money due to oversupply.
 * Meatpackers claim that low poultry prices are the reason for low cattle ales, not their captive supply systems, which they say promotes efficiency.
 * Ranchers say that captive supplies and secret transactions are used to control the market.
 * Three of Archer Daniels Midland’s officials were sent to jail for conspiring to control the international market for lysine; however, they still remain the world’s largest producer of the feed additive, as well as a large shareholder of IBP.
 * Mike Callicrate, a cattleman from Kansas, decided to testify against corporate behavior, causing him to be rejected by major corporations.
 * Since land prices in Colorado are so high, it’s hard to prevent the land from being sold to developers, which diminishes productive capacity.
 * Colorado is losing its ranching culture: in a country where TV Westerns used to be the stuff of daydreams, now few students embrace that culture in dress.
 * Land trusts are helping ranchers gain conservation easements, which save land and allow it to be passed to the next generation.
 * Conservation easements mostly benefit wealthy gentleman ranchers who have another source of income. Normal ranchers don’t really benefit from the tax breaks and having neighbors with easement properties causes the value of land to increase.
 * Full-time ranchers have the most economic difficulty, despite the fact that they embody supposedly American values like independence and self-sufficiency.
 * Hank killed himself just before Christmas 1997 at the age of 43.
 * His death seemed to contradict his impassioned and involved life.
 * Although it may not have been a direct cause, pressure from concentration of meatpackers and developers played a part in his depression and suicide.
 * The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers is three times higher than the national average due to losing the cultural connection in every sale of land that occurs.
 * Hank never got to fulfill his storybook dreams of riding into the sunset on his ranch. He was buried in a coffin made by friends.