Testimony at livestock industry antitrust hearings 'defend a way of life'

Farmers across the country are encouraged to attend a Friday meeting in Fort Collins, Colo., where U.S. Department of Agriculture and Justice Department officials will take testimony on antitrust violations in the livestock industry. "To thousands of people, however, this hearing isn’t about rules and regulations or interpretations of century-old laws," Bill Bishop writes for the Daily Yonder. "They are driving hundreds of miles to Fort Collins to defend a way of life." The meeting has been called the "most important day in the history of the U.S. cattle industry and in rural America," by Bill Bullard of Montana-based cattle raisers group R-CALF, who is trying to get 25,000 people to come to the meeting.

"Everybody in rural America needs to understand that this can be a beginning of a new direction," Bullard said earlier this month. "This is our opportunity and everyone who has a stake in rural America needs to be in Fort Collins on that day." Bishop agrees with Bullard that the meeting has large implications for rural America as it represents a government reinvestment in antitrust action after the Bush administration saw it as "ham-handed, intrusive and so, well, 20th century," Bishop writes.

The meeting offers a rare blending of politics with "thousands of lizard-booted ranchers and Deere-owning farmers, most from red states, driving hundreds of miles to support a big government solution proposed by a Democratic president," Bishop writes. The National Farmers Union has asked farmers to abandon the red/blue dynamic so common to our country's political system Friday by wearing green shirts to the meeting. Perhaps most importantly, the Fort Collins meeting may represent just the beginning of the antitrust push in agriculture. Wal-Mart now controls 25 percent of the nation's grocery business, which some say is forcing consolidation among meatpackers. USDA and the Justice Department are set to hold its final hearing in December, this one on competition in the retail grocery business. (Read more)