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Farm and Food File: The best way to start is to start Alan Guebert Forty years ago, two editors at Successful Farming magazine, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton, won most major ag journalism awards with a story titled “Who will kill the hogs?” The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit the 600,000 hog farmers in the U.S.: Local meatpackers were being squeezed for hogs and markets by other, aggressive packers that were buying competitors to shutter them and build new, huge, highly-efficient slaughtering plants. The story was a clanging bell that a sec...

Farm and Food: The best way to start is to start By Alan Guebert Forty years ago, two editors at Successful Farming magazine, Gene Johnston and Dean Houghton, won most major ag journalism awards with a story titled “Who will kill the hogs?” The piece (not available online) tracked a new, potent shift just beginning to hit the 600,000 hog farmers in the U.S.: Local meatpackers were being squeezed for hogs and markets by other, aggressive packers that were buying competitors to shutter them and build new, huge, highly-efficient slaughtering plants. The story was a clanging bell that a sec...

Photo: RiverNorthPhotography/iStockphoto Karen Perry Stillerman, senior analyst, Food and Environment | December 21, 2020, 2:40 pm EDT This post is a part of a series on Tyson Foods is the nation’s largest (and world’s second largest) meat and poultry producer. It operates 110 processing plants with 121,000 employees in the United States and boasted $42 billion in revenue in 2019, putting the publicly traded, Arkansas-based company at #79 in the Fortune 500. As it seeks to maintain meat indu...

Published: Friday, December 18, 2020 The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois. In early 1999, I wrote a column about lions and gazelles. More precisely, I wrote a column on how, in the 1990s, American livestock farmers had become "gazelles in the brutal world of global agriculture." What that meant was "Every morning the gazelle awakens knowing it must run faster than the fastest lion to live to see tomorrow" while "the lion awakens knowing it must run only as fast as the slowest gazelle..." As such, that era's low-profit hog, cattle and dairy sect...