Kill the Qutoa System - We Want American Milk

[Fransisco]

<blockquote>Willagro-We live in an area where one corporation controls <b>most</b> of the auction marts for hundreds of miles around as well as <b>major</b> shares in a packing plant. How do you fight THAT monopoly?</blockquote>

"Most" does not equal all. "Major" does not equal all". You can legally sell outside of the area, you can legally raise and slaughter your own animals.

It is not a monopoly.

If you want more choices more competition fine work towards that. Here is a hint replacing few options with only one option moves you in the wrong direction.

[cottonpicken]

Dont bother with the monopoly concept wilagro.

I tried explaining it a few months ago and it didnt work with this bunch.

[charliep]

One if the big changes has been the opening of the border to the south. US buyers are one thing that adds competition into the cattle market. Cow calf, backgrounders and feedlots also have choices around satelite autions, contracting programs, rail grade and investing in processing facilities themselves. One of the good things out of BSE (likely the only) is that many cattleman got a lot more creative in their marketing including direct to consumer.

Started on dairy and went to CWB/cattle. Always interesting to see how topics shift.

[Fransisco]

Which brings up another good point that you interventionists always get backwards. The closing of the border and the remaining restrictions are the result of <b>government</b> actions not market</b> ones.

Government bad.

Market good.

[silverback]

You are right charlie.

Back to the original dairy blast.

I visited several veal farms a few years ago, and those calves were the shiniest, most energetic calves I have ever seen. Those farms were running on razor thin margins and losing even one calf was not profitable so they did everything they could to keep those calves healthy.

None of those farms sounded anything like what was posted earlier.

[cottonpicken]

Which brings us back to the main topic of this website.

One seller good, ten thousand sellers bad.

[Fransisco]

Except that really it is

Multiple Sellers Multiple Buyers=Good

Monopolies suck.

[grassfarmer]

CharlieP, Surely you are more aware of the beef situation than your post reflects? You must realise how limited producers choices are for marketing cattle "satelite autions, contracting programs, rail grade" don't amount to much choice unless there are more than the "big two" processing cattle in this province. By the time you count the feedlots feeding cattle for the packers on contract, the ones owned by packers and the ones gone out of business there are very few independent feedlots left to bid on feeder cattle. As far as investing in processing goes that hasn't gone too well if you've followed the progress of the various proposals. Apart from Ranchers Beef at Balzac there is nothing new of significance available in Alberta.
As far as playing with the word monopoly try oligopsony instead - we have a very limited amount of buyers which is poor for producers. To suggest that one buyer is bad but two is good because there is competition is nonsense. Try reading Ben Roberts book on the packing industry in N America - way back before 1900 there was restricted competition in the marketplace with the "big 4" or "big 5" packers operating their price fixing cartels - nothing has changed, indeed the problems have worsened.

[cottonpicken]

Monopolies suck unless your the monopoly.

[Fransisco]

Tell that to the guy who takes out a 2 million dollar loan on quota the day before it becomes worthless.