Incredible

[smcgrath76]

Gf - The way I see it is that part of the problem is that he is half right. Farmers
produce and sell in a perfectly competitive marketplace, but the buyers don't operate
that way. In other words, buyers are also empowered by the fact that they can find
willing sellers at extremely low price points. The justification for single point
purchasers (or double point - JBS, Excel) is always economies of scale, which at some
point can only be justified by ignoring the externalities of the business (offloading
hidden costs on society). This is true in more than beef.
There are some farms working together to market (eg: Grain marketing clubs, prairie
heritage) but in a lot of cases they are pursuing markets that the big buyers have
overlooked, or simply command a volume premium (transactional cost reduction) rather
than adding product value.
The solutions could be several - one direction - increase number of buyers - this is
tough in the current environment (speaking as someone who once owned part of a packing
plant.
Another direction - reduce the number of sellers - I initially was thinking of
marketing boards/clubs, but this is also happening naturally by attrition
Another option - choose to do something totally different - see Gaucho, Randy and
yourself as examples.

[rkaiser]

or - quit finding problems and listening to gaucho tell Kaiser to stop dreaming and wasting his time talking about a producer owned plant.

Still working on opening another plant boys and personally I don't really care how.

The BS that I want a plant to pad my pockets drips off my back like water off a duck by now.

I actually love it when I see other companies moving ahead in the natural beef sector and offering a choice to people, and children in particular that I believe need a choice. If that is as far as we can push it --- so be it.

If we took a collective (don't be scared my capitalist friends LOL) approach, we could do a lot more.

How come the word dysfunctional comes up so often these days with producers and believe it or not retailers and wholesalers; when Cam Ostercamp used it to the disgust of many, ten years ago.

The word now needs to be more like "perversely dysfunctional" and obviously oblivious to government. And many of the wonderful industry leaders who feed this "perfect competition" bull shit to these bureaucrats need to be ashamed of themselves. Seriously