Feedlot meat production: nothing if not profitable

Tyson Foods chief nets $10 million -- oops, no, $24 million

Posted by Tom Philpott at 5:02 PM on 27 Dec 2007

Read more about: food | agriculture | Big Ag | industrial ag | business

Update [2007-12-28 10:14:4 by Tom Philpott]:According to AP, Tyson CEO Richard Bond made total compensation of $24 million in 2007, not $9.88 million, as reported by Bloomberg.

Here's how industrial meat production works: you stuff animals into pens, feed them genetically modified, nutritionally suspect corn and soy (along with growth hormones), and force them to wallow in their own waste while keeping them alive with regular lashings of antibiotics.

Then you haul them to vast death factories, where de-skilled, low-paid workers, under immense time pressure, dismember them and pack their flesh into little shrink-wrapped styrofoam packages.

There's plenty to be said about these practices -- Lord knows I've said my share, and I'm not done.

But you can't say feedlot meat production isn't profitable. Here is Bloomberg News:

Tyson Foods, the largest United States meat producer, increased the compensation of its chief executive, Richard L. Bond, fivefold and quadrupled the pay of its former chief, John H. Tyson, as the company returned to profit after a 2006 loss.

Despite heightened corn and soy prices, Tyson churned out $268 million in net income in its last fiscal year, Bloomberg reports. CEO Richard Bond's compensation package reached $9.88 million, while company chairman and former CEO John H. Tyson, grandson of the founder, pulled in $9.25 million.

These marvelous profits and fat salaries are only possible because the company expertly externalizes the vast environmental, social, and economic messes it creates nationwide.

Getting those costs off the backs of communities, and onto the meat industry's balance sheet, should be a primary task of the environmental movement in 2008.

For story: Feedlot meat production: nothing if not profitable
4 Comments | Post a Comment

Will We Let Corporate Agrobusiness Kill Us?

A new study published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Emerging Infectious Diseases links a new strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), once found only in pigs, to more than 20 percent of all human MRSA infections in the Netherlands (the study can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/13/12/1834.htm).

Antibiotics in Feed, MRSA, & Factory Farms: Will We Let Corporate Agribusiness Kill Us?

Read the AgriView article:
http://www.agriview.com/articles/2007/12/06/livestock_new ...

by Karen Lee Orr at 8:11 AM on 28 Dec 2007

Chicken manure

Chicken manure, which is about 10 times cheaper than alfalfa, is considered as an acceptable source of protein in cattle feed (it's reportedly safe if the manure is heated to kill the bacteria, however, this precaution is often ignored). Coprophagy, or feeding on manure is, of course, nothing new; however, given the exponentially increasing intensity of factory farming, it is only a matter of time before another BSE-type deadly outbreak of prion disease(s) in the livestock/human food chain would lead to a major disaster.

by LGT at 9:26 AM on 29 Dec 2007

Profit?

Try the new wrinkle in family farming. Grass fed, rotational grazing for dairying and meat production. Organic meat and dairy is a gold mine.

Now imagine a huge Prairie National Park spanning parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and neighboring states. Assign commercial hunting rights quotas to farmers now going broke from climate change drought, who agree to sell their farms to the park, with their homes retaining the family owership inside the park.

They can harvest bison, now there's some profit. Even guide hunters to get their own bison, and various wildlife species that thrive in the nastural prairie environment. Game birds for instance, Cheney should love this idea, hehey.

Huge herds of grass fed bison, now that's healthy food.

And the government can set fair lease prices for wind power investors to site huge wind machines, assuring affordable, clean power for consumers. If the government doesn't provide fair leasing of wind sites, it will turn into a hedfge fund fiasco of corruption and insider trading. killing the low cost of wind energy that can benefit the uS economy.

Don't let the exxonmob monopolize renewable energy, like they have fossil fuel. We see the wars and recessions that result.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 12:55 PM on 29 Dec 2007

CAFO animals are disposable machines

Specifically, machines with planned obsolescence, very short-term. Many varieties, e.g. the turkeys that the president "pardons" at Thanksgiving, are so ingeniously hideously bred to grow so much meat at so early an age that even if they are liberated, like those turkeys, they are too unhealthy to survive for long.

Would that the day might come, very very soon, when the world's adamant intractable meat-eaters can be satisfied with meat sliced from great batches of tissue artificially grown in laboratories, without any connexion to a real living animal whatsoever.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:11 AM on 02 Jan 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.