The USDA document is quite long, and I haven't had a chance to print it out and take a sharp pencil to it. But a heavy skim produced interesting info.

The document contains a wealth of information on what researchers call "CR4" levels in the food industry. CR4 simply tells us the percentage of a market controlled by its four largest players.

When markets become concentrated, the buyers (i.e., food corporations) get tremendous power to influence the prices they'll pay to the sellers (e.g., farmers). As the prices farmers receive from their goods fall, they face pressure to scale up, mechanize, replace hand labor with poisons and synthetic ferilizers, etc.

According to antitrust theory, a market is considered concentrated when CR4 hits 40 percent. Check out this sampling of CR4 levels in food, also from page 23:

Breweries 91
Malt manufacturing 91
Beet sugar 80
Breakfast cereal 78
Other snack food 75
Distilleries 71
Specialty canning 71

Wow! The four biggest beer-makers control more than 90 percent of the market.

There's also a good discussion of hyperconsolidated meat markets. On page 26, for example, it emerges that nationwide, we lost upwards of 20 percent of both our hog and beef-processing facilities between 1994 and 2004. That loss of processing infrastructure will make it much more difficult for small-scale livestock farmers to satisfy rising demand for pastured, local meat.

This document, emerging not from some greenie non-profit but from the USDA, only underlines the case Aimee Witteman made here a few days ago for a competition title in the 2007 farm bill.

It also demonstrates a point I've made again and again: it's time to reinvest in local food processing infrastructure throughout the United States.