To the Editor:
Re “Break Up the Beef Cartel,” by Sandeep Vaheesan and Claire Kelloway (Opinion guest essay, June 1):
Instead of spending your hard-earned food dollars to purchase from the industrial operations that produce about 98 percent of America’s pork, beef, chicken and eggs, consider buying from small-scale pig, beef, chicken and egg farmers whose high prices reflect neither profit nor greed but rather the higher costs of their humane and environmentally sound methods.
These small farmers raise their animals outdoors on carbon-storing pasture and feed them significantly reduced amounts of corn and soy, or none at all. Most Americans do not know that the lion’s share of our cropland grows feed for animals that are kept indoors or in feedlots — and that about 94 percent of that corn and soy is grown with glyphosate (known by the trade name Roundup). That’s 175 million acres of corn and soy feed for animals versus less than 10 million acres for all vegetables, fruits, legumes and nuts combined.
It’s more expensive, and requires more care, to raise animals humanely, but there are many of us meat producers waiting for customers to see that the world is really tied together by a string and that they can vote with their forks for the right food system. Your body might just thank you for it, too.
Cleo Braver Allie Tyler Easton, Md. The writers are the owners of Cottingham Farm.
To the Editor:
The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was an antitrust law designed to promote competition in livestock, meat and poultry markets. It aimed at thwarting collusion among beef packers that exploited both consumers of beef and ranchers who supplied live cattle. It worked fairly well for more than half a century, but it is unclear how committed the Trump administration’s secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, is to enforcing it and ensuring competition in the market.
In 2008, the antitrust division of the Justice Department did successfully challenge a proposed merger between two of the largest beef packers, but there is little evidence that the current Trump administration or the last one is or was concerned with antitrust issues.
The bill that Senator Chuck Schumer introduced in March to break up the dominant beef-packing corporations is one way to address the high concentration in the meat sector, which goes back a century. It offers Americans a slim hope that legislation will address the consolidation in the food industry, and ultimately the inflation in beef prices.
John M. Connor Indianapolis The writer is a professor emeritus of industrial economics at Purdue University’s department of agricultural economics.
To the Editor:
As a part-time beef farmer, I don’t agree with the authors that beef is too expensive. It’s good to see the beef price up where it should be. You have no idea how much a cow can eat!
I’m constantly amazed when I go to the grocery store and see the price of vegetables per pound. And yet one of my cows could eat that whole counter of vegetables and gain not even one pound.
Give us poor farmers a break.
Tim Siepel West Valley, N.Y.
To the Editor:
Re “America’s Livestock Gulag,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, May 31):
If the 2026 farm bill includes the meat industry’s Save Our Bacon Act, a provision aimed at nullifying state efforts to improve pig welfare, it will be a moral and constitutional failure. It has passed the House, and as Mr. Kristof points out, it is up to the Senate and a conference committee to decide whether to include this provision.
The abject cruelty of keeping pregnant sows in gestation cages at factory farms is hiding in plain sight, and most Americans, 84 percent according to one poll, say it is unacceptable. It is a federal power grab if the many state laws that regulate Big Pork, including Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, are overridden. Both Iowa senators, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, are backing the provision, on behalf of a state with a 7-to-1 pig-to-person ratio.
Alas, if only the pigs could vote. But humans already have.
Allison Sole New York
To the Editor:
As a small-scale farmer who cares deeply about the animals I raise, I wish the discussion about farm animal welfare were less black and white. In between factory farming and veganism are thousands of small farms that, yes, process animals for meat, but that make an enormous effort to give their animals the best quality of life possible.
We should be encouraging meat eaters to choose this ethically raised meat, rather than pushing them toward choices — veganism and vegetarianism — that most will never make.
Carrie Wasser Gardiner, N.Y. The writer is the owner of Willow Pond Sheep Farm.
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