Beef Buzz News
NCBA's Ethan Lane Talks DOJ Investigation and Grassley Fischer Bill With Ron Hays
Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:22:21 CDT
The cattle industry is still waiting on the Department of Justice and a word on where their investigation into the four major beef packers and wrong doing by them when it comes to possible price fixing or collusion that has harmed the ranchers in the cattle pipeline that end up supplying cattle to their processing plants. Some in the cattle industry believe that the major beef packers are to blame for smaller cattle operations going out of business because they artifically depressed cattle markets.
Ethan Lane, Vice President for Government Affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, says his group is frustrated by no word from DOJ. He tells Oklahoma Farm Report's Ron Hays "We asked for an investigation in the spring of 2020- so did everyone else in the cattle industry- you know we have heard very little since other then we know they have been investigating and they have been talking to producers- talking to market participants but you know the DOJ doesn't speak in press releases like a lot of us do- they don't come out and say- we haven't found anything yet and we will keep you posted- if they say something, it's usually through an indictment which they have not done in this case yet."
Lane believes that cattle producers around the country need and deserve to know what they have found during this investigation- good, bad or otherwise- and he adds that it will be hard to move forward with possible solutions in the business until something is known.
Lane and Hays also talked about the newest version of the so called Grassley Fischer Cattle Markets Bill(details of it from the Senators' web site news release- available here). Lane says of the government mandate in this latest revision on this proposal "The government mandate is not just still there- but it seems to get progressively wierder in every version of this bill- I just don't know how else to describe it."
He points to having USDA carve up the nation into five to seven regions and then mandating cash cattle as very worrisome- and says that NCBA as well as the American Farm Bureau have policy on the books from earlier this year opposing government mandated cash cattle trade.
You can hear Ethan Lane's comments on these issues from his conversation with Ron Hays by clicking on the Listen Bar at the bottom of this story.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
Ron Hays Beef Buzzes with Ethan Lane of the NCBA on the DOJ Investigation and more
right-click to download mp3
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