In an interview with WORC's Western Organizing Review, Dudley Butler, former administer of the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, has called on Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to apologize for his veiled threats and knowingly lying about what Butler supposedly had said about the proposed GIPSA rule.

Listen...

Sale of National Beef looks a lot like a Bain Capital maneuver.

Did National Beef 's cattlemen owners just get "Romney-ed"?

John Miller, National Beef's former CEO, now consultant and member of the Board of Managers, was a top fundraiser for Romney's 2008 presidential campaign. He owns property next door to Romney in La Jolla, CA.

Miller and the National Beef management team tried to sell National Beef to JBS/Swift in May, 2008, further concentrating an already monopolized beef sector. Antitrust concerns prevented the sale. In another attempt to sell-out, the management team postponed an Initial Public Offering in December, 2009, citing weakness in the IPO market.

Finally, National Beef has found a buyer. U.S. Premium Beef (USPB), National Beef's captive-cattle-ownership group, is now a minority owner, losing its majority interest to Leucadia National Corporation.

Connections of Miller, Romney and Ian Cumming, chairman of Leucadia National Corp., whose family owns Park City Mountain Resort, go back at least to Utah's 2002 Winter Olympics. Romney was the SLOC president where it turned out it was, "...the campaign contributors who win [won] the gold."

Miller and friends will make out with Romney sized profits and USPB members will make money on their initial stock investments, but will likely lose their primary reason for buying into National Beef - a market for their cattle.

Will the USPB cattle producer owners soon be weeping about, "When Leucadia Came to Town"? Regardless, so much for that producer-owned co-op...

"You'll never look at dinner the same way again." -- Food, Inc

Since the 2008 film Food, Inc. pulled back the curtain on industrial food production, corporate agribusiness has been scrambling, doing damage control. A food system that destroyed family farming and left rural main streets with little...

Do we have the courage of our ancestors?

Back in the 1990's when I was suing IBP for anticompetitive practices and being shut-out of the market by the big beef packers, I asked Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman why he didn't enforce the P&S Act of 1921.

National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) and Beef Checkoff taking credit for developing new products and building beef demand is as ridiculous as a company like BP claiming to promote the Gulf fishing industry.

I recently attended a gathering at a Five Star hotel in Colorado Springs. A lady sitting at...

Federal action needed to restore domestic food system

The last thirty years have been tough times for independent livestock producers.

For decades, in addition to the hard work of keeping our farm and ranch operations running each day, we have literally been in a fight for...

In the newly released food film, Fresh, Russ Kremer proudly proclaims, "They [consumers] want my pigs...they want my product!" Russ is a long time hog farmer who decided that doing what is best for the hogs, as well as the people who eat his pork, is what matters, even...