Where is the Beef? Regulatory Barrier to Entry and Competition in Meat Processing
"In short, regulatory extortion tyranny. Inspection regulations are size prejudicial. I know one facility that was ordered closed because it wasn’t processing fast enough. The Food Safety Inspection Service measures its efficiency by pounds inspected per personnel-hour, creating an adversarial discriminatory attitude toward small plants.
In 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle 7 large companies controlled half the nation’s meat processing capacity. After a century of government intervention, 4 now control 85 percent. When licenses and compliance make entering and maintaining an abattoir more burdensome to small facilities than large, concentration and centralization is not an anti-trust issue; it’s a discriminatory regulatory issue."
—Joel Salatin
Video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5yStXjQSOR4
Full testimony:
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/salatin-testimony.pdf
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Replies (3)
Over the past year I apprenticed at a custom exempt butcher who killed and processed animals for other people. Then I worked part time at a custom exempt butcher who bought USDA inspected pork/beef and sold it at his shop. The USDA beef was far more contaminated than what I killed and processed in a run down shack behind an old hillbillies barn. We did a better job with a .22 rifle, a couple Harbor Freight winches and a garden hose than a multi million dollar government inspected factory. Why? Because we cared about the quality of our work. We are proud of the product we produce for our customers. Laws or inspections make someone care just enough to not to get shutdown and never enough to care about the customer.
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