The Mega Corporations That Control What Americans Eat

24:18He doesn't do it for me. That's actually a compliment, Joe. That's the worst thing I can think of. Okay, so there is that incredibly sad aspect running throughout the book. There's also, you know, you mentioned the manure problem. One of the things I was really interested to read in the book is that often these big companies are rewarded for coming up with solutions to problems that they essentially create. And I can't remember the specific name of the cow one. Fair Oaks Farms and Fair Life. Yes. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about that, like how companies are basically, you know, rewarded for doing this?

24:53Oh, that's such a it's almost it's so comical. It's so bad. So the big thing in agriculture is like our second largest contributor to climate change. And especially with beef and dairy are driving it, along with the fossil fuels used in food, grain production. So dairy, this is getting in the weeds, but, you know, normally used to be pasture family dairy farms. You know, they have 60, 70 cows. The cow defecates and, you know, creates the fertilizer for its feed. When you put them into a metal shed, they pool the manure. Well, when that manure breaks down in a pooled environment, it creates methane gas that's not produced when it's on land.

25:32And so you have all this additional climate change contributing gas being produced in this production model. So if the cows are in a field somewhere pooping the normal way, that manure would end up on grass and it would break down and there wouldn't be a lot of methane generated just from that process. Bingo. So not only so when you put them inside, you create this methane, this additional methane, you're also using fossil fuels to grow their feed inside. So what the industry is trying to do is create some of these manure biogesters, they're called. You basically pull the manure and you try to capture the gas coming, the methane gas coming off it.

26:05It takes an immense amount of subsidy. And that is USDA's big, one of their big solutions to climate change right now is spending a ton of money on this. The problem with that is you're incentivizing a really destructive model. The dairy industry is fascinating to me. It's one of the most complex commodities, in my opinion. The joke in the dairy world is only five people understand the dairy system and four of them are dead. But our milk consumption is going down. But our dairy consumption is going up because we're eating more cheese and ice cream. Those aren't healthy things. And we're producing more.

26:36We're also doing it in regions that environmentally cannot sustain it. The Texas panhandle. New Mexico. My favorite little cocktail chatter is that Mexico dairy does three times more dairy than Vermont. and so you have this system this is being sold as a solution to a problem it created itself that didn't exist before and that to me is like I mean they're trying to put ethanol in airplanes now I thought the conversation on ethanol is over but that's the story of the modern agricultural system is you have all this money sloshing around kind of corrupting an honest conversation

27:16Thank you.

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29:01Crypto trading provided by XeroHash. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. In your life, and maybe even within the span of time that you've got interested in this specific subject and wrote the book, have you sensed a change in the politics of food? Because I feel like when I was a kid that being anti-factory farming, as it was called, animal welfare, multinational corporations, many of these things, I would have primarily associated with liberals or the left. And I get the impression that these days that actually like the sort of debasing of the food system, the poisoning of the food system, et cetera, is actually migrating a little bit and that you see more of this talk on the right.

29:49There's even something you've written about, which is that I think it was in like the 1996 primary. Pat Buchanan making a lot of hay, so to speak, by talking about. Good one, Jeff. Thank you. Not intentional changes in hog production, but that the dominant strain among mainstream Republicans was like pretty like safely on the side of the big business. Can you talk a little bit about that political evolution? Yeah, I mean, that to me is like one of the most hopeful things about this. The food system right now is the chance for a bipartisan reform movement. I mean, a lot of the ideas in this book started in articles I wrote in the American conservative.

30:22I mean, I was very intentional on that. But I mean, I think a few things are contributing to that. Number one, I feel like when most Americans go abroad now, one of the first things you always hear from them is the food is better and cheaper abroad. And I lost weight while I was traveling, even though I was gorging on Italian pasta and bread and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. That and then also like the undercurrent, too, for a lot of these barons is I mean, especially meatpacking. They're not American companies. the meat industry these are state-backed monopolies i mean they're they're intentional development strategies of like in the beef packing my slaughtering baron is a jbs first of all they became a monopoly through bribery they admitted to it and the fact that we let them keep their monopoly status is kind of incredible but that was an intentional development strategy by the country of brazil to have a dominant player and so that's why i mean the beef farmers right now have just been an uproar the last few years because i mean there if i could include one graph in my book, it would be on what you're paying in a store for beef and what ranchers are getting.

31:18It has diverged so much. Oh, these are the packing margins, basically. Yes. Say more on that. So basically, the family farm has died in dairy and hog production. Beef is the last one standing. And you have, you know, these animals are huge. You can't ship them far. So even though, you know, three companies might have, let's say, 80 % market share, when you're in Montana, you really don't, you only have one or two packers. And so what they're trying to do right now, besides only having one or two options, is they're trying to kill the spot market, which in my head, I compare it to eBay. They want production contracts.

31:48And so you're having this combination of the U.S. cattle herd is at the lowest since 1950s. And part of that is because of the drought in the Great Plains. But also this is where I think is super fascinating is JBS has it has production. It slaughters animals in all the beef production regions of the world, Australia, Brazil and America. And so it just kind of shuffles based on currencies, the beef you're seeing in the store. So farmers are, they just don't have a lot of buying power right now. And the other thing too with beef is they haven't quite figured out the industrial production model with it.

32:21They're starting to. Industrial production model of beef sounds... Delicious. No. No. Dystopian. Thank you, Joe. So there are a number of moments in this book that are disturbing in various ways. And one of the moments where I kind of gasped audibly had to do with the dairy industry and the Chekhov system. And a lot of people will never have heard of Chekhov's, but they will have heard of advertising campaigns like Got Milk. So could you maybe explain what those are and how they tie into, I guess, the structural decision to overproduce certain commodities, and then you have to figure out ways to ramp up consumption?

33:04Yeah. No, I'm so glad you asked about Chekhov's, because it's one of those things where I was so determined to put them in my book. But it's so hard to explain it to people. So checkoffs go back to the 1930s. They come out of Florida. It was basically these tiny little things. Florida oranges, way to advertise a commodity. They were a little tax on producers. They really started ramping up in the 1980s as this what I call the Wall Street Farm Bill took hold, where as we're overproducing a few things, how do we stimulate demand? Became the goal of a checkoff. So I tell the story how farmers could vote to create one and they create one.

33:37There's a whole different conversation over farmers could vote in one, but USDA won't allow it. And I kind of tell that story with hogs. They threw out the vote in the late 90s. But so you have this. Most of them are kind of small. There's like 20 or 30 checkoffs, Christmas tree checkoff, popcorn checkoff. They're mostly under milk. The Christmas tree farmers basically get together and they say, we're going to, you know, pool like a certain amount of money. And that money is going to go to promoting Christmas trees and getting people to buy more. Yes. But dairy is a different one. And dairy, we're talking about a$600 million annual budget.

34:09So you're taking a tax on dairy farmers and it was, you know, got milk is the famous thing. But they realize my conversations with people is that didn't stimulate demand or didn't really work. So what I argue has happened is instead of trying to do advertisement, it's moved to financing junk science. A lot of this science over these manure digesters is being financed by these checkoffs, by the dairy checkoff. To me, it's filling the void as we privatize our colleges, universities in America, especially the land grants in the middle of the country. The checkoff dollars have filled that void. And so that to me is why the agricultural markets have partly have gotten so concentrated is you have this whole pot of money, collectively$800 billion.

34:49We don't even know, by the way, because USDA is atrocious at keeping track of it. There's tons of government accountability reports getting on them to do something. They don't do anything. But it's a revolving door. So a lot of USDA officials go work out of checkoff. They come back. Secretary Vilsack did that. So between administrations, his job was he was a dairy export lobbyist. So his job was Canada has a supply management dairy system. So his job was basically gut it so we could dump our surplus cheese into their markets. But that to me is such a key thing. So my dairy baron, I tell the story of how he actually first financed a lawsuit to end the checkoff because what he realized what happened with hogs in Iowa was he needs to have a branded thing or else he's going to die like the hog farmers.

35:31He tested out in Texas at the grocery store, HAB, like a bougie milk product. And he was upset. Why finance my competitor, this generic milk product? So he financed the lawsuit, didn't. And basically, I tell the story of how he seemingly made peace with the checkoff. And he was able to use some checkoff dollars to finance not only these manure digesters, but also this branded drink he helped create called Fairlife. If you go to any gym in America, young men love it because it's super high protein content. If you go to Planet Fitness, it's just full of kids drinking that stuff. Something to replace Celsius with, Joe.

36:03Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, that was my first thought. It was like, oh, I'm going to try one tomorrow when I go to the gym. You mentioned that so much of the land in Iowa is not owned by Iowans anymore. You know, like I said, I was born in Michigan. I lived for many years in Illinois, but I didn't want to stay in the Midwest. I wanted to come to New York City and be a professional podcaster. And I get like sentimentally, like I said, oh, my idyllic family farm in Alligate in Michigan, it was so beautiful in the berries. But like ultimately, like I didn't want to stay, you know, I never aspired to be a farmer.

36:39Like how much of this is just like structural changes in people's preferences that are just sort of maybe even much bigger than food? And yeah, you know, we remember fondly these small farms, but the next generation doesn't want to stick around. I mean, that's a really key point to remember. And that's something, I mean, I wrote this book over five years. Yeah. And the beauty of doing that is you write a little bit, you walk away. And we romanticize that Glorian past a lot. Yeah. I don't want to go back to that new deal supply management system. Because in the day, I'm at the point now we junk the farm bill.

37:12Take that money. It's too corrupted. Put it into conservation programs. Because every farmland is different. The way you do farmland in Connecticut is different than Hawaii, than Iowa. Also, the growth of robotics in agriculture has been really underappreciated. You go to a farm show now, these things drive themselves. I mean, they cost like$600 ,000 and they're going to happen before cars. So like most, there's a very good chance that most row crops are going to be robotics very, very soon. But to me, animals is the key thing here. I really want to put animals back on the land. Because the whole thing too to keep in mind is this model makes pretty bad tasting food.

37:48When I was writing this book, I was doing little like I would do a milk tasting. This is how you get the steak aficionados on board by saying you'll have like more abundant, good quality meat by fixing the system. Oh, like my wedding. My husband and I got married in Iowa and I was insisting we had pasture meat and dairy. My mom's one of 12, Irish Catholic, you know, tails all this time. And we serve pork and the amount of people in my Iowa family was like, this is the best tasting pork. It was just like we kept hearing that. And it's just like, oh, you're used to like when an animal stands inside a metal shuttle that needs corn from a ceiling.

38:19It's not going to taste as good as an animal that does picky things.

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40:01Do that with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. So you mentioned scrapping the farm bill just then. And what can be done at this point to, I guess, reverse some of the structural decisions that have gone into producing America's agricultural system as it is now? Yeah. So one of the things that gives me hope is the movement to EVs, electric vehicles and cars is going to kill ethanol. I think ethanol has been one of the most destructive things to happen to the Midwest. It actually pushed a lot of cattle farmers out, pushed them off their land. Instead of having cattle on pasture, they put in corn.

40:37And also the thing to keep in mind is the single largest use of corn now is ethanol. And that transition is going to happen fast when it happens. And so how do we kind of start pivoting? So as ethanol dies, then we slowly phase out these industrial animal facilities. But animals back on the land, it's a good jobs program for rural America because there's only so many animals one person can do. I think using school meals is a really good procurement way to drive the supply chain. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, who doesn't want Wisconsin kids even drinking pasture milk? You know, stuff like that.

41:12And then what started this whole conversation over berries is that model of berry production is rooted in sharecropping. And just ban that. Like, you can't— Explain more. What is the specific berry model? So the berry model actually comes out of chicken. I didn't even—when I started writing this— It's the tournament system, Joe. It's the tournament system. So when the meat regulations were written a century ago in response to the jungle and all that stuff, chicken wasn't written to the regulations. Okay. because there wasn't you didn't buy chickens at the store you just had one in the backyard and you killed it so this model comes out of the south where have you guys defined the tournament system before i know or we need a new remind us yes okay so it they call it the southern model if you're a chicken farmer in america you don't actually own your bird you're given the bird by the company the feed told it feed to use whatever you basically babysit the bird you then sell you give it back to the company they weigh it it's you're paid on tournament systems whoever adds most weight gets paid the most.

42:09So if Joe, you're not behaving bad, if I don't really like you as some company, I give you the run of litter, you get paid the lease, you know, you're not making that much money. Also, you have a ton of debt. These stats are a little old, but it's like 70 % chicken farmers in America live in poverty. And so you have this model take hold in the South with chicken production. And because of that, where you're shifting all the externalities and really abusing farmers and labor, chicken's really cheap to produce. So it gains massive amount of market share in the protein markets. Well, instead of USA, instead of forcing chicken to behave like the other meats, what we see is a race to the bottom.

42:44So starting the eastern shore of North Carolina, the hog markets in the poor black areas starts doing this model. To me, this is the best example of structural racism in the food system is you have these poor black areas, North Carolina, full of these industrial hog facilities. And because of the water table levels, North Carolina, they can't, and usually in Iowa, they take the manure and they inject it into the field. In North Carolina, they spray it in the air. You have all these stories of like, you know, poor black churches having to repaid their steeples every few years. Or they're dry, you know, you can't do laundry outside, dry it out.

43:13So this model then replicates across the food system, most notably the berries. And I tell this story how the Driscoll brothers, they were smart to realize the rise of Walmart, of Walmart wants one company to do four berries year round. So what they started doing is, so most berries, strawberries are really fickle. Historically, a lot of them were grown on the California coast. So they grow them on the coast and they realize that it's more efficient to have that sort of outsourced labor, right? Outsourced labor, well, you have the cost of housing increasing in California. That's a very short growing window on the coast.

43:47Historically, it would move up the, I cannot remember if it moves up or down the coast, but it would, the production region would shift from city to city for the berries. Well, they started moving production to like Morocco, to Baja, California, to the point now where Driscoll's grows berries on every single continent except Antarctica. But part of it is by moving offshore, there's less labor standards, there's less environmental standards. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about how a lot of berry production is in Baja, California, in a region that is just as dry as Death Valley. They drain the aquifers, then they build a desolidization plant in the ocean.

44:20And a lot of these are indigenous workers. And no one really knows what goes on in these places. I mean, you see stories here and there enough where it's like the tip of an iceberg where you see like, I mean, there's a story in Reuters a few years ago how the gangs in Mexico got into avocados. You just don't know what's going on when these supply chains get that long. This is part of the Bitcoin avocado correlation conspiracy that the reason that correlation exists or used to exist because it's broken down has something to do with financing Mexican mafia. I just have one last question. But since you brought up Walmart and, of course, for years and even still, but for years, the sort of grocery store system in the U.S.

45:01was famously fragmented. There really weren't any sort of dominant national chains. There were, you know, regional chains, obviously. Just sort of big picture. Like, what is the existence of this dominant nationwide grocery store, biggest grocery store company in America? What are the ripple effects in terms of, you know, you mentioned berries, but in terms of creating concentration of power elsewhere across the food supply chain from the existence of this one powerful end seller? Oh, the Walmart chapter, that might be my favorite chapter of the book. It's twice as long as any other chapter. I mean, I also just love grocery stores.

45:38Let me start there. Same. But I also never thought of Walmart as a grocery store when I started this book, even though 60 % of it sales grocery. I love this little anecdote where Sam Walton got the idea from Walmart from a French company, Carrefour. If you've ever been to Europe, you see these Carrefour's everywhere. He saw on vacation and was like, I'm going to copy that because it gets you in the store. You need grocery every few days. But Walmart, at the same time Walmart's starting to rise, you see this whole framework, Robinson-Patman Act, collapse. These are basically competition protections in the system between suppliers and vendors like Walmart.

46:10And so as Walmart's market power gets bigger, it's able to basically squeeze its supplier more and more. And to me, this little nugget I found, I love reading trade press and these little regional business publications. You find the best nuggets. In Northwest Arkansas, there's a business publication I spent a lot of time with. and they report how Walmart has a rule with its vendors that you cannot get more than 30 % of your sales from Walmart, which I didn't understand at first. I had to ask around to the people in the grocery industry, why do they have that rule? And that's a supply chain risk management rule because Walmart knows it's such a vulture that it puts more than 30 % of your market, you know, sales come from Walmart, you're putting the company into a fragile space.

46:53At the same time too, so that really puts a lot of power in Walmart's hands. I kind of compare it to like supply and command. my husband rejected this idea, but I really want to kind of frame this around like the closest thing we've ever had to like an American Politburo. He's going to laugh when he hears that. But the Walmart family, their power is just, I mean, they're the richest family in the world. And this whole chapter is framed around Walmart and Amazon had been in this epic battle centered in grocery the last few years. And I kind of came away thinking Walmart's winning. And the thing about the Walmart to keep in mind is Jeff Bezos only owns like 10 % of Amazon.

47:24The Walmart family owns the majority of Walmart. I mean, they've been selling some shares lately. I think it dipped finally below 50%. But Walmart's goal is like, when Walmart comes to town, you don't buy more milk. You just shift your production. So Walmart has this goal to basically capture every dollar of America's underclass. You know, they're putting these banks inside Walmart. They're putting these healthcare clinics inside Walmart. But they're also making vertical plays into the food system. They just announced a few weeks ago that they're building their third dairy plant in Texas. They're making a big beef operation in the plains.

47:54And from my conversations with people is Walmart was so kind of fed up with being gouged by the other Barron's that it made these is making these vertical play. So it has an insight into cost structure. So that way, when it bargains with companies and knows like, no, no, no, don't don't toy us around. Tired of Barron. So it became a Barron. Barron versus Barron. Joe, you and I went to Bentonville in Arkansas, and you definitely get a sense of Walmart's power in that particular town. Austin, that was so interesting and fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots and listing your barons behind America's agricultural concentration.

48:36Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me on.

48:50Joe, I want to ask if you enjoyed that conversation, but that doesn't seem like the right question. Let me ask, are you going to be walking into grocery stores muttering about antitrust and concentration and the illusion of choice like I am now? Maybe. Probably. To some extent, I'm definitely going to pay more attention. You're going to be dancing down the aisles going, the steak is on sale. Well, so my takeaway from this conversation is that a lot of it is really about values. We can have a calorically abundant, hyper-efficient food supply chain where maybe it's not the best tasting meat, but a lot of people can afford steak and hamburger meat and even fresh berries on a way that may not have been the case 20, 30, or 40 years ago.

49:36But A, there are clearly environmental externalities, someone is going to pay the cost. And there are big structural changes to society in the sense that do we want a handful of companies, say, owning a huge swath of the land in Iowa or Michigan or elsewhere? These are pretty legitimate debates to be having. And what is the optimal trade-off and what is the optimal mix? So I do think there is a lot of fertile ground for figuring out like, well, where do we want to like calibrate that dial? I think that's a totally fair way of putting it. Absolutely. It's a value judgment about what kind of system you want to see.

50:15I do think there is a tendency, not just with agriculture, but we talk about this all the time in finance, this idea that you kind of think certain things are inevitable, like the existence of money markets or euro dollars, that those kind of just happen. But of course, they were the product of conscious decisions and there were reasons to do them. Same thing with agriculture. Something like the farm bill might have made sense when it was first proposed. Maybe it doesn't make as much sense now. One thing I think about now, though, is I guess the experience of the past few years of inflation, so much of which was in food prices.

50:50And I can kind of see on the one hand, OK, maybe that leads us to reevaluate things like antitrust. So maybe people start to wake up to the idea that, oh, well, companies are pushing through price increases because there's not as much competition as there used to be. On the other hand, if we want to get really cynical about it, it seems like people just really hate high food price. Sure, yes. And so you could also see people going like, well, we want to make those prices even lower. So let's have more efficiencies. Let's have bigger supermarkets. Let's do less environmental protection because that's expensive.

51:27So it feels like it could go either way. Totally. And, you know, you mentioned, you know, in the early part of the conversation, this gap between, you know, fresh foods and fresh vegetables versus processed foods. And, you know, on some level, it's not surprising, right? historically, I mean, if you went back a long time, there were like mass famines and food would cost infinite amount because the food did not exist. And so to some extent, we've reduced that volatility in the price of food by essentially reducing the amount that the end product is actually directly related to a food commodity at all.

52:04And so, you know, if you think about a Frito, there's some amount of corn in there, but mostly it's the process of an industrial process, but you don't have these big, you know, swings in the price of Fritos the way you're going to have in swings in the price of corn because it's the end product is only partially related to the commodity. There are some nice things about that, right? That is the most impassioned defense of Fritos I've ever heard. That actually makes a lot of sense. Right? Like, it's sort of like a built-in price head. But I do think a lot of these things, like I didn't want to, you know, stay in the Midwest.

52:37I was never really like there was no prospect of me ever, I don't think, working on my grandmother's farm. But I think a lot of these things like strike about like deep questions about our value, the values at a society. And I do think it's interesting that there is this sort of change maybe afoot in the politics of food that is sort of maybe bipartisan or trans ideological. Well, that's my big question, because you feel like a lot of the environmental concerns, like depending on how you couch them, could have bipartisan appeal. So, you know, there are a lot of people in Republican states that enjoy going out to the great outdoors and presumably don't want to see a manure lagoon when they do that.

53:19And so you feel like it could have wider appeal just depending on how it's sort of presented. But Joe, you should come visit my place in Connecticut. I've got, I've got. You've never invited me. No, you probably I have. I have. It's just hard to get out there. I've got fruit trees. Okay. I've got raspberries. Great. I've got strawberries, which will be ready in June. And I'm planting blueberries right now. Bring some in and I'll give it so I can give them to my kids and save some money. I brought you tomatoes last year, but I'll bring strawberries this year. All right. Shall we leave it there?

53:50Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Austin Farrick. He's at Austin Farrick. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics in the Discord 24-7 with fellow listeners, discord.gg slash OddLots.

54:26and if you enjoy Odd Lots if you like it when we do deep dives into agriculture then please leave us a positive review on your favorite platform and remember if you are a Bloomberg subscriber you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free all you need to do is connect your Bloomberg account with Apple Podcasts thanks for listening

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