[Senate Hearing 117-376]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                        S. Hrg. 117-376

                  EXAMINING MARKETS, TRANSPARENCY, AND
                PRICES FROM CATTLE PRODUCER TO CONSUMER

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                       COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE,
                        NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY

                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION
                               __________

                             JUNE 23, 2021
                               __________

                       Printed for the use of the
           Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
           
           
                  [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]  
                  
                
                  Available on http://www.govinfo.gov/
                                    
                              ___________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
                    
46-305 PDF                WASHINGTON : 2022                      
                  
                  


           COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY
                                 
                 DEBBIE STABENOW, Michigan, Chairwoman
PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont            JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio                  MITCH McCONNELL, Kentucky
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota             JOHN HOEVEN, North Dakota
MICHAEL F. BENNET, Colorado          JONI ERNST, Iowa
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York      CINDY HYDE-SMITH, Mississippi
TINA SMITH, Minnesota                ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois          TOMMY TUBERVILLE, Alabama
CORY BOOKER, New Jersey              CHARLES GRASSLEY, Iowa
BEN RAY LUJAN, New Mexico            JOHN THUNE, South Dakota
RAPHAEL WARNOCK, Georgia             DEB FISCHER, Nebraska
                                     MIKE BRAUN, Indiana

               Joseph A. Shultz, Majority Staff Director
               Mary Beth Schultz, Majority Chief Counsel
                    Jessica L. Williams, Chief Clerk
            Martha Scott Poindexter, Minority Staff Director
                 Fred J. Clark, Minority Chief Counsel



                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                        Wednesday, June 23, 2021

                                                                   Page

Hearing:

Examining Markets, Transparency, and Prices from Cattle Producer 
  to Consumer....................................................     1

                              ----------                              

                    STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY SENATORS

Stabenow, Hon. Debbie, U.S. Senator from the State of Michigan...     1
Boozman, Hon. John, U.S. Senator from the State of Arkansas......     2

                               WITNESSES

Tupper, Justin, Vice President, United States Cattlemen's 
  Association, St. Onge, SD......................................     6
Gardiner, Mark, Partner, Gardiner Angus Ranch, Ashland, KS.......     8
Tonsor, Dr. Glynn T., Professor, Department of Agricultural 
  Economics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS..............    10
Aherin, Dr. Dustin, Vice President, RaboResearch Animal Protein 
  Analyst, Rabobank, Chesterfield, MO............................    11
Hendrickson, Dr. Mary K., Associate Professor, Division of 
  Applied Social Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO..    13
                              ----------                              

                                APPENDIX

Prepared Statements:
    Tupper, Justin...............................................    46
    Gardiner, Mark...............................................    58
    Tonsor, Dr. Glynn T..........................................    63
    Aherin, Dr. Dustin...........................................    69
    Hendrickson, Dr. Mary K......................................    82

Document(s) Submitted for the Record:
Boozman, Hon. John:
    Ashland Veterinary Center Inc., letter of support............    90
    F Cross Cattle Company, LLC, letter of support...............    92
    Blair Brothers Angus Ranch, letter of support................    94
    Dalebanks Angus, letter of support...........................    96
    Performance Blenders, letter of support......................   100
    Bruning Farms, letter of support.............................   102
    Means Ranch Company, LTD., letter of support.................   104
    Wayne Peek, letter of support................................   106
    Harp Farms, Inc, letter of support...........................   108
    E-1053 Fed Cattle, letter of support.........................   110
    NAMI, letter of support......................................   140
    NCBA, letter of support......................................   156
Smith, Hon. Tina:
    Examining Markets, Transparency, and Pricesfrom Cattle 
      Producer to Consumer, prepared statement for the record....   186
Stabenow, Hon. Debbie:
    R-Calf USA, letter of support................................   187
Grassley, Hon. Charles:
    Iowa Farm Bureau, letter of support..........................   191
Fischer, Hon. Deb:
    Nebraska Cattlemen, letter of support........................   192
Thune, Hon. John:
    South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, letter of support.....   195
    South Dakota Cattlemen's Association, letter of support......   197

Question and Answer:
Tupper, Justin:
    Written response to questions from Hon. John Boozman.........   202
    Written response to questions from Hon. Raphael Warnock......   203
    Written response to questions from Hon. Roger Marshall.......   203
Gardiner, Mark:
    Written response to questions from Hon. John Boozman.........   235
    Written response to questions from Hon. Roger Marshall.......   236
Tonsor, Dr. Glynn T.:
    Written response to questions from Hon. John Boozman.........   239
    Written response to questions from Hon. Tina Smith...........   244
    Written response to questions from Hon. Roger Marshall.......   246
    Written response to questions from Hon. Deb Fischer..........   256
Aherin, Dr. Dustin:
    Written response to questions from Hon. John Boozman.........   259
    Written response to questions from Hon. Roger Marshall.......   262
    Written response to questions from Hon. Raphael Warnock......   267
Hendrickson, Dr. Mary K.:
    Written response to questions from Hon. Tina Smith...........   269
    Written response to questions from Hon. Raphael Warnock......   269
    Written response to questions from Hon. Roger Marshall.......   274

 
  EXAMINING MARKETS, TRANSPARENCY, AND PRICES FROM CATTLE PRODUCER TO 
                                CONSUMER

                              ----------                              


                        WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 2021

                                       U.S. Senate,
         Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m., via 
Webex and in room SD-G50, Senate Dirksen Office Building, Hon. 
Debbie Stabenow, Chairwoman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present or submitting a statement: Senators Stabenow, 
Brown, Klobuchar, Bennet, Gillibrand, Smith, Booker, Warnock, 
Boozman, Hoeven, Ernst, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Tuberville, 
Grassley, Thune, Fischer, and Braun.

STATEMENT OF HON. DEBBIE STABENOW, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE 
    OF MICHIGAN, CHAIRWOMAN, U.S. COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, 
                    NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Good afternoon. I call this hearing of 
the U.S. Senate Committee Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry 
to order.
    A couple of notes. There is a vote scheduled for 3. We will 
proceed and just ask members to go vote and come back if you 
have not yet asked your questions. Also, I am told that the 
only ones that control turning on the mics are ourselves. In 
this system staff cannot do that. Please push talk when you 
want to talk, and then turn it off, unless you want everybody 
else to hear what you are saying after you talked. Thank you.
    First I want to thank members of the Committee on both 
sides of the aisle who have requested that we have this 
important hearing. We are going to focus specifically on our 
cattle markets today. Many of us have heard from producers 
concerned with a lack of transparency and competition. These 
farmers and ranchers also raised concerns about concentration 
in the packing industry, potential market manipulations, lack 
of access to small and mid-sized plants, and a range of other 
issues.
    This is a really important conversation, as the Committee 
considers reauthorization of the Livestock Mandatory Reporting 
Act, and as we oversee implementation of the $4 billion in 
funding to strengthen the food supply chain that I authorized 
in the American Rescue Plan. USDA announced a broad outline for 
using those funds earlier this month, which will include 
supporting new and expanded regional processing capacity. Just 
this week, USDA also announced a new grant program to help 
small processors upgrade their plants to meet Federal 
inspection standards. That would help smaller processors boost 
their capacity and meet increased demand while providing more 
opportunities for small and mid-sized livestock producers, 
nationwide, and certainly I am looking forward to that in 
Michigan.
    Still, we have work to do. Several of our Committee members 
have introduced proposals to address these issues, issues of 
transparency, competition, processing capacity, and I look 
forward to discussing these proposals and working with 
colleagues as we move forward.
    Above all, we need to talk about how to make our food 
supply more resilient. The pandemic made clear how really 
important this is. Early last year, shifts in demand forced 
producers to plow under crops and dump milk. At the same time, 
consumers panicked at empty store shelves, and food banks faced 
lines of waiting cars a mile long.
    Compounding this disaster was the failure of many meat 
processors to adequately protect their workers from COVID-19, 
resulting in tens of thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths. 
These outbreaks caused plants to shutter and forced many 
producers to euthanize animals they could not get to market. 
The price livestock producers received plummeted, while 
consumer prices surged.
    In an effort to stabilize the market, Congress stepped in 
to provide assistance for workers and producers. Cattle 
producers, in particular, received $6.45 billion to offset 
losses. Just last week, Secretary Vilsack announced resources 
to keep employees safe with pandemic response and safety 
grants.
    However, these only help mitigate some of the effects. Many 
of the vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic still exist. We 
were reminded of that in May when a ransomware attack froze all 
of Brazilian-owned JBS's Northern American processing. One 
attack on one company halted one-fifth of U.S. meat processing 
capacity. The issue was only resolved, according to reports, 
after JBS paid $11 million in ransom.
    Concentration and consolidation clearly play a large role 
in many issues affecting the industry. For example, USDA's 
Packers and Stockyards Division data show that four companies 
account for 85 percent of fed cattle slaughter. With fewer 
companies and more foreign-owned companies controlling more of 
the marketplace there is a widening gap between those giant 
players and the small, and medium-sized processors that many 
local farmers and ranchers count on.
    What happens when farmers and ranchers have fewer options? 
What are the immediate effects and what are the unintended 
consequences? Those are the questions I hope we can begin to 
answer today.
    I would now like to turn to my friend, Ranking Member 
Boozman, for his opening remarks.

 STATEMENT OF HON. SENATOR JOHN BOOZMAN, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE 
                       STATE OF ARKANSAS

    Senator Boozman. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and 
thank you for setting the stage for this afternoon's hearing. 
The topic we are here to learn more about is so very important 
to a number of Senators, both on and off this Committee. The 
U.S. cattle industry has a storied history. It is the backbone 
of many rural economies, and represents the largest segment of 
agriculture in many parts of the country. Many success stories 
are associated with the industry, as it has carved out its 
place as the world's most sustainable producer of high-quality 
beef.
    In 2019, 14 percent of the beef produced in the U.S. was 
exported, generating $8.1 billion in value. By comparison, in 
1990, only four percent of the beef produced in the U.S. was 
exported. Correlating with this growth in exports is the 
increased quality of beef produced in the U.S. today. Nearly 85 
percent of the beef produced in the U.S. is graded prime or 
choice. In the early 2000s, only about 50 percent of our beef 
earned these grades.
    This improvement in quality is due to producers making 
investments in their herds, in genetics, management, and 
feeding practices to produce higher quality and more diverse 
products for the global consumer base. These investments are 
being made across every segment of this complex and 
interconnected industry, from the cow-calf producer to the 
backgrounder, packer, and further processor to provide the 
wholesaler, retailer, exporter, and ultimately the consumer a 
growing variety of nutritious beef products.
    While this industry is diverse and modernizing in numerous 
ways, the nature of the beef cycle dictates that the industry 
is slow to adapt to even the most immediate changes. The ribeye 
I am having for dinner tonight was derived from a steer that 
was conceived over two and a half years ago. While changes can 
be made in the cattle industry overnight, the effects of those 
changes may not be realized for years. When any one segment of 
this industry experiences an unexpected event, like the fire at 
the beef plant in Holcomb, Kansas, in 2019, it ripples through 
the entire supply chain.
    When every segment of the cattle industry experienced the 
effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, that ripple effect was 
amplified in a manner that has been unmatched throughout modern 
history. Though we are moving beyond the havoc wreaked by 
COVID-19, new challenges are now confronting this industry--a 
worsening drought in the West that is creeping into the Plains, 
increasing input costs, severe labor shortages that are 
limiting utilization of packing capacity, supply chain 
challenges at our ports that have been worsening for months, 
and the threat of regulatory overreach. The past two years have 
been some of the most difficult this sector has ever 
experienced.
    Mounting frustration is resulting in calls for widespread 
reform of the cattle industry due to these difficulties. We 
must carefully consider reforms in response to the exceptional 
black swan events that have occurred since 2019, and the 
consequences both intended and unintended of such actions. An 
increasing number of producers are marketing their cattle 
through alternative marketing agreements to manage risk and 
buffer themselves from market volatility while also capturing 
gains for the value-added investment made to their herd.
    Yet we are hearing questions about whether current market 
conditions allow for adequate price discovery for fed cattle 
and the effect that a thinning cash market could be having 
throughout the supply chain. I am interested in hearing 
perspectives from our stakeholders on these topics and for the 
Committee to gain a better understanding of the impacts of 
proposed reforms on beef producers, processors, marketers, and 
consumers. I thank all of our witnesses for their participation 
in this important hearing and helping this Committee learn 
about this multifaceted industry and the unique challenges that 
it faces.
    Madam Chair, I have received several letters and written 
testimony from cattle producers and stakeholder groups who are 
interested in today's hearing, and I request unanimous consent 
to include these documents for the record.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Without objection.

    [The letters can be found on pages 90-185 in the appendix.]

    Senator Boozman. With that I yield back.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much.
    We will introduce all of our witnesses. I will turn first 
to Senator Thune for our first introduction.
    Senator Thune. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to you 
and to Ranking Member Boozman for having this hearing. We are 
here today because we need answers. We have cattle producers 
who produce the highest quality beef in the world, and they 
deserve to be able to participate in a marketplace that 
operates fairly, transparently, and with integrity. I am 
delighted that you have called this hearing, and I look forward 
to hearing from all our witnesses, but I, in particular, want 
to recognize a panelist who is here from my home State of South 
Dakota, and I want to welcome to the Committee Mr. Justin 
Tupper, from St. Onge, South Dakota.
    Justin is a cow-calf producer who also serves as Vice 
President of the United States Cattlemen's Association. In 
addition to his cow-calf operation, Justin manages the St. Onge 
Livestock Auction, which holds sheep sales every Thursday and 
cattle sales every Friday. I have been there on a few of those 
Fridays for those cattle sales.
    Justin, thank you for being here today. I look forward to 
your testimony and input about how we can improve the situation 
for cattle producers in our State. Madam Chair, with your 
indulgence, Justin, before you begin your testimony, I am 
guessing some members of this Committee have maybe never been 
to a sale barn. Since you are an auctioneer, would you mind 
demonstrating, for members of this Committee, what they would 
hear if they were on a sale day at the St. Onge Sale Barn?
    Mr. Tupper. Why, sure. Thank you, Senator Thune. With that, 
I do not know that we could get them in this room, but if we 
had a fat steer here we would ask $1.20----
    [Demonstrates auction call.]
    Mr. Tupper [continuing]. and hope we get to $2.00. That is 
where we are trying to head. Thank you, Senator Thune.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. I love it.
    Senator Thune. Thank you, Justin.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. You know, my experiences at many 4-H 
livestock auctions, more than probably where you were, but I 
have heard that many times. When I was bidding, they always bid 
me up. They always watched what I was doing, and I always ended 
up paying higher than anybody else. It is wonderful. It is 
wonderful to have you here, and thank you, Senator Thune, for 
that example.
    Our next two witnesses are going to be introduced by 
Senator Marshall. We have two people from Kansas. You would 
almost think that Pat Roberts was still chairing the Committee. 
Senator Marshall.
    Senator Marshall. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and please 
bow your head when you say the name Pat Roberts here today. I 
certainly am pleased to see several Kansans participating as 
witnesses in today's hearing. It is certainly an honor to 
introduce two of them. First is my good friend, Mr. Mark 
Gardiner, a fifth-generation Kansas farmer. The Gardiner family 
is one of five families that traveled in a caravan of covered 
wagons to the Ashland, Kansas, area in 1885. His ancestors 
lived in dugouts on the harsh prairie on their homestead land, 
incidentally just some 70 miles from where my great-grandmother 
lived in a dugout, subsisting on jackrabbits and biscuits.
    Sticking with that pioneer spirit, Mark, his father, Henry, 
and the Gardiner Angus Ranch are some of the key architects of 
value-based marketing in the beef industry that pays cattle 
producers for the quality of their cattle. In 1997, Mark became 
a founding member of U.S. Premium Beef, and today is the last 
remaining original board member.
    The Gardiners, and many of their friends and neighbors, 
persevered through great adversity in 2017, when almost the 
entire ranch was consumed by the largest wildfire in Kansas 
history. The Starbuck Fire burned more than 450,000 acres in 
Kansas, after burning nearly 200,000 acres in Oklahoma.
    Mark and his wife, Eva, lost their home while the ranch 
lost hundreds of cattle to the fire, and hundreds more had to 
be euthanized. The miracle, only one human life was lost. The 
aid that came from across the Nation to help ranchers certainly 
was the most outpouring of love and hope I have ever personally 
witnessed.
    Now unfortunately, Mark cannot be here today. Evidently he 
had a disagreement with his horse, and the horse won. Mark, I 
want to thank you for being here, and I look forward to your 
perspective.
    The second individual I have the pleasure of introducing is 
a Professor in the Department of Ag Economics for the ever-
optimistic and fighting Kansas State Wildcats, Dr. Glynn T. 
Tonsor. Dr. Tonsor grew up in Missouri, Kansas neighbor to the 
east, on a farrow-to-finish swine farm. He obtained his 
bachelor's degree from Missouri State University, and his Ph.D. 
from the Kansas State University. While we claim him as a 
Kansan now, I would be remiss if I did not point out he spent 
several years as a faculty member at our Chairwoman's alma 
mater, the Michigan State University.
    There is no questioning Dr. Tonsor's academic profile in 
the agriculture realm. Since 2010, Dr. Tonsor has written over 
78 peer-reviewed publications, and has been a wealth of 
knowledge in the meat and livestock industry. It is difficult 
to argue with Dr. Tonsor's opinion that ``the U.S. beef and 
cattle industry is arguably the country's most economically 
important agriculture sector,'' which underscores the 
importance of today's topic.
    Glynn and his wife, Shauna, live in St. George, Kansas, 
with their children, Ethan, Levi, and Aubree.
    Now it has been a while since we have three K State 
Wildcats participate in one hearing, and we look forward to 
your testimony as well.
    Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much, and Senator 
Roberts and I would be going back and forth between Kansas 
State and Michigan State. I am glad to see that we have one 
person representing both. That is wonderful.
    I am going to turn to Senator Boozman now for our next 
introduction.
    Senator Boozman. Yes. I would like to introduce Dr. Dustin 
Aherin, Vice President, RaboResearch Animal Protein Analyst in 
Chesterfield, Missouri. Dr. Aherin is an animal protein analyst 
at Rabobank, focusing on beef. Dr. Aherin joined the Rabobank 
Food and AgriBusiness Group after completing his Ph.D. in 
pathobiology from the Beef Cattle Institute at Kansas State 
University. You guys are taking over.
    His previous work focused on cow-calf production systems 
assessing both biological and economic efficiency. Dr. Aherin 
worked as a feed yard sales representative for an animal health 
company and was a visiting fellow at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. In addition 
to his Ph.D., Dr. Aherin has a bachelor's and master's in 
animal science from Kansas State University.
    Thank you, Dustin, for being with us today, and welcome.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you. Last but certainly not 
least, Dr. Mary Hendrickson. Dr. Mary Hendrickson is an 
Associate Professor in the Division of Applied Social Sciences 
at the University of Missouri. She also serves as Co-Director 
of the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security. She studies 
the way food production and consumption has changed over the 
past few decades and how farmers, consumers, and communities 
can create more sustainable food systems.
    In 2020, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Iceland, teaching 
sustainable agriculture. From 1997 to 2012, she worked to 
create local food systems in Missouri as an extension 
sociologist, gaining valuable, on-the-ground experience in 
transforming food systems.
    Welcome to each of you, and we will begin today with five 
minutes of witnesses testimony from each of you, and we 
certainly welcome anything else in writing that you would like 
to share with the Committee as well.
    Mr. Tupper.

   STATEMENT OF JUSTIN TUPPER, VICE PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES 
        CATTLEMEN'S ASSOCIATION, ST. ONGE, SOUTH DAKOTA

    Mr. Tupper. Thank you for the opportunity to provide 
testimony today. We appreciate both the Chairwoman and the 
Ranking Member for coming together in a bipartisan manner to 
host this hearing. This is definitely a producer issue. It is 
not a partisan issue, so we thank you.
    I am privileged to be here representing cattle producers 
and independent meat processors across the U.S. This hearing is 
critical because there is a crisis in rural America. We are 
losing our producers at an alarming rate, all the while 
watching big corporate feeders, and packers, make record 
profits, with the threat of vertical integration hanging over 
our head.
    As cattle producers, we are natural stewards of the land. 
These family farmers, ranchers, work day in, day out to produce 
a high-quality protein product in a safe and sustainable way. 
As we sit here today, producers in my State, and across the 
country, are enduring devastating drought conditions. This is 
just one of the many challenges cattle producers face, year in 
and year out, all the while managing the land, borrowing money 
to keep the operation running, fighting drastic shifts in 
weather, and dealing with rising input costs and a falling 
bottom line.
    Most ranchers who sell their calves at weaning time are 
selling those calves for less than $1,000 a head. That is 
somewhere near $100-a-head profit after all input costs, and 
amounts to less than a one percent return on investment--an 
incredibly risky business. For those that raise and sell all 
the way to fat cattle, calving to finish, a finished steer is 
worth somewhere around $1,600 a head, today. Packers could buy 
that steer, process it, and sell it for beef alone, not 
counting byproducts, for over $2,800 a head today, for a gross 
margin profit of over 80 percent.
    We, as cattle producers, understand and want the packer to 
make money. That makes the whole system work. Since 2015, 
corporate packers' gross margin has ballooned from an average 
of $100 to $200 a head to well over $1,000 a head. Packers have 
enjoyed unbelievable profits, harvesting around 120,000 head 
per day, while cattle producers go out of business and 
consumers pay double or even triple at the meat counter. Cattle 
producers, when they make money, reinvest in their local 
community, buying and upgrading equipment, paying more for 
feeder cattle, and reinvesting in the land through conservation 
practices.
    The corporate packer does not reinvest in the industry, or 
sometimes even in country. Of the four companies that harvest 
about 85 percent of the U.S. fed cattle, two of those, JBS and 
National Beef, are owned and operated outside the United 
States, in Brazil. The main goal of these corporations is not 
to reinvest in our land or our people, but to create value for 
their shareholders-not to mention the big four packers are also 
heavily invested in our direct competition, plant-based and 
lab-grown alternative proteins.
    The packers ability to increase control of supply of cattle 
solely committed to one packer has made it nearly impossible to 
have active price discovery. In my years as an auctioneer and 
operating St. Onge Livestock, I have learned the most important 
participant in true price discovery is the second bidder. In 
most cases in the fat cattle trade today, we do not have a 
second bidder. There are simply not enough market participants.
    In traditional market times, it was assumed when boxed beef 
prices rose, a packer would ramp up chain speed to increase 
profits. Instead, they are using limited chain speed and 
shackle space to increase profits and make the same money, or 
more, harvesting less cattle. Producers see huge losses in 
equity while the packer reaps all the rewards, despite having 
the least amount of risk and owning the product the least 
amount of time, all while exploiting producers and ultimately 
the consumer.
    American cattle producers do not want nor are we looking 
for a handout. We just want a fair and equitable playing field, 
staffed by a referee with a whistle and a flag. Producers 
cannot be sustainable or generational without being profitable. 
Building a safe and secure food supply starts with ensuring the 
success of our food producers. These cattle markets are very 
complex--we know this--but when there is an oligopoly with four 
packers controlling the industry there are only two ways to 
level the playing field. We can either work to eliminate the 
occurrence of anti-competitive practices and market 
manipulation in the meatpacking sector, or, as we have seen 
done in the past in other industries, we can break them up so 
they cannot have as much influence or ownership in the market.
    We do not take these challenges lightly. We believe these 
are critical times. The United States Cattlemen's Association, 
of who I am testifying on behalf of today, is fighting to 
secure our food supply system, our rural communities, and our 
members, and our members' livelihoods.
    My graduating class in Kimball, South Dakota, 100 miles 
down the road from Senator Thune's hometown, was 32 in 1991, in 
rural South Dakota. Just a few weeks ago, in Kimball, South 
Dakota, they had 19 graduates out of that same high school. 
They have also combined in athletics. The towns have not shrunk 
but the rural areas and the cattle-producing areas have.
    I thank you for your time, and I appreciate and look 
forward to any questions you may have.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Tupper can be found on page 
46 in the appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you so much for your testimony.
    Mr. Gardiner.

  STATEMENT OF MARK GARDINER, PARTNER, GARDINER ANGUS RANCH, 
                        ASHLAND, KANSAS

    Mr. Gardiner. Thank you, Chairwoman Stabenow, Ranking 
Member Boozman, and members of the Committee. My name is Mark 
Gardiner from Ashland, Kansas, and I would like to thank you 
for the opportunity to visit today. This is a very important 
topic for the U.S. beef industry, and I am very pleased to 
represent beef producers who are committed to the industry to 
raise the safest and highest quality beef in the world. I am a 
fifth-generation rancher whose 12 family members are all 
involved in our beef production.
    Today our topic is complicated. The cause of this issue is 
not. A processing plant fire, a pandemic, and a ransomware 
attack caused extraordinary disruption in processing, resulting 
in a dramatic drop of the processed beef supply and a bulging 
oversupply of live cattle. This caused an unprecedented drop in 
cattle prices while simultaneously leading to a record rise in 
beef prices, all driven by pure economic market principles.
    Today we have too many cattle and too little processing 
capacity. We have a volatile marketplace, created by outside, 
unavoidable factors, not any one market player. We have 
observed similar market disruptions in lumber, automobiles, and 
other goods.
    Now the solution for all of this is very complicated. 
Processors are adding capacity due to the demand for high-
quality beef. Adding this capacity will take time. History 
tells us we will reach a point when ample processing capacity 
will compete for a limited supply of cattle. When this happens, 
the marketplace will shift and the producers will have more 
leverage. The question for us in the meantime becomes how much 
damage will regulations do to the marketplace by artificially 
manipulating the pricing mechanisms? Experience tells us the 
unintended consequences of these actions can create longer-
lasting havoc and even greater volatility to our industry.
    Let us look at our industry history. From 1980 to 1995, we 
were the very picture of an industry in trouble. Consumer 
satisfaction was at an all-time low, and we were losing market 
share at a rate that put us in peril of being an irrelevant 
protein. This loss of market share and dissatisfaction was 
rooted in the production sector. In other words, producers had 
to resolve our quality issues at the beginning of the supply 
chain.
    What caused the disconnect between our product and the 
consumer? It is very simple. All cattle were purchased on the 
average. There were no incentives. One price fit all. 
Progressive producers needed and wanted to price cattle on a 
value-based system that paid for each animal based upon value, 
not average. Superior cattle have more value. Inferior cattle 
have less value. These incentives aligned producers to respond 
to consumer signals.
    Today we have record beef demand. Producers designed and 
negotiated these grids with the processors. The information 
transfer between the industry sectors establishing pricing 
mechanisms that rewarded producers who delivered the beef the 
world desired.
    I want to stress the greatest benefit and the greatest 
added value has been achieved by the very smallest producers. 
They have reaped the largest dollar value per head and were 
given market access.
    The unintended consequences of regulated government 
mandates, such as Senate Bill 3693 and 543, could potentially 
have a negative effect on the beef industry. I am unaware of 
any data or research that indicates these proposed regulations 
will have a positive change on the price of cattle going 
forward.
    There is considerable discussion regarding the cash trade. 
I look at this as a base price, no different than a commodity 
like wheat. I can call our local elevator and get the base 
price for wheat. If I hit the target to value with my wheat, 
due to protein content or baking quality, I am paid for this 
additional value. Value-based marketing operates on the same 
concept. We know the target to value for the processor and the 
consumer. If we achieve these goals we are compensated for 
producing superior beef.
    A possible price discovery we could look at, on the thinly 
traded cash market, is to have all base prices a formula grid 
and alternative market arrangements become a part of mandatory 
price reporting. This base price needs to be inclusive. I 
remind you that this comes up for renewal on September 30, 
2021. Any changes that we make are better if implemented by the 
industry versus government mandates.
    Thank you so much for the opportunity to visit today.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Gardiner can be found on 
page 58 in the appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Dr. Tonsor.

  STATEMENT OF DR. GLYNN T. TONSOR, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF 
  AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY, MANHATTAN, 
                             KANSAS

    Mr. Tonsor. Chairwoman Stabenow, Ranking Member Boozman, 
and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to be 
here today.
    The U.S. beef and cattle industry is arguably the country's 
most important agricultural sector. The sheer size and 
importance of the industry must be appreciated before 
implementing any proposed policy change, as the potential 
exists to impact many members of our society.
    It is not surprising the industry's markets are complex. I 
often describe the industry operating as a Rubik's Cube--when 
one thing changes, so do many others. Industry evolutions are 
accepted by some, but not all stakeholders, and that is to be 
expected.
    Perhaps no relationship is currently more relevant than the 
relationship of fed cattle inventories to processor capacity. 
Prior to 2016, it was estimated, for many years, there was more 
processing capacity than fed cattle inventories. That 
relationship changed, and since roughly 2016, fed cattle 
inventories have often exceeded operational processing capacity 
in our industry.
    The Holcomb plant event in 2019, and developments during 
the pandemic, occurred in this setting. Economists expect lower 
fed cattle prices and higher beef prices in this situation. On 
balance, that is what we have observed. Going forward, it is 
generally expected fed cattle volumes will decline and some 
physical processing capacity is likely to be added.
    The U.S. meat industry sells products into three main 
market channels: domestic retail, domestic food service, and 
export markets. The industry maximizes overall revenue by 
producing, processing, and marketing distinct products for 
these market channels that value them most. This results in 
higher overall carcass and livestock values.
    One of the most drastic shocks from the pandemic was 
extraordinary disruption in the relative demand across these 
three market channels. These post-farm gate developments 
directly impact derived demand for livestock and hence, 
livestock prices. These shocks also highlight the need and 
value for better data and information.
    Over the years, I have worked on multiple projects on the 
livestock mandatory reporting, or LMR, program. It is important 
to appreciate a significant amount of more trusted information 
on the market is now available than was the case prior to LMR, 
over 20 years ago. Economists have long recognized the 
substantial value of reliable, accessible, and timely market 
information because it critically guides resource allocations. 
I believe USDA AMS does a sound job of implementing LMR, and I 
encourage ongoing consideration of adjustments and 
enhancements.
    Alternative marketing agreements, or AMAs, have grown in 
use in recent decades. Initial interest in AMAs from both buyer 
and seller perspectives originated largely from costs or 
operational efficiencies. Furthermore, consumer demand signals 
led to proliferation of beef products. This, in turn, elevated 
demand for specific cattle, and with that further interest in 
use of AMAs.
    Increased use of AMAs reduces cost and enhances demand in 
some segments of the industry. That, itself, is a worthwhile 
outcome. AMAs present a multitude of well-documented economic 
benefits while reducing the volume of traditional spot-market 
transactions. For some context, in 2014, 23 percent of domestic 
fed cattle were sold on a negotiated basis, while 58 percent 
were sold using formulas. More recently, in 2020, negotiated 
rates were 23 percent while formula rates were 65 percent.
    The core point of that comment is while cattle prices, beef 
prices, and estimated margins certainly have changed--they are 
different in recent years than they were in 2014--it is my 
opinion it is inaccurate to assert this simply reflects how fed 
cattle are marketed. Rather, in my opinion, core differences in 
supply and demand reflect these market changes.
    I encourage the industry to proceed forward in a manner 
that does not deteriorate economic benefits of the industry's 
evolution to improve beef quality and align effort with beef 
demand signals. This pursuit should include regularly assessing 
ways to enhance the information content available on markets. I 
encourage LMR to not only be reauthorized but for enhancements 
to be considered. I have noted some of those in my written 
submitted testimony. More research is needed on the types of 
information contemporary markets need, and how to most 
effectively collect and disseminate that information.
    I will end by highlighting all revenue available to 
industry participants ultimately originates with consumers. 
Hence, aligning industry efforts with consumer demand is truly 
essential. Fortunately, the U.S. beef cattle industry is the 
envy of many others for several reasons. Comparative advantage 
of the industry includes being a global leader in the 
production of high-quality, grain-finished beef desired by 
consumers around the world. I encourage today's discussion to 
be mindful of the factors which favorably distinguish the 
industry, and are core to the prosperity prospects not only of 
today's industry participants but also those of future 
generations. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Tonsor can be found on page 
63 in the appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Now we will hear 
from Dr. Aherin.
    Welcome.

 STATEMENT OF DR. DUSTIN AHERIN, VICE PRESIDENT, RABORESEARCH 
    ANIMAL PROTEIN ANALYST, RABOBANK, CHESTERFIELD, MISSOURI

    Mr. Aherin. Chairwoman Stabenow, Ranking Member Boozman, 
and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to join 
the discussion today. As an animal protein analyst for 
Rabobank, which is engaged across the entire beef supply chain, 
I assist in strategic decisionmaking for both the bank and the 
bank's clients offering a research-based perspective on 
fundamental market dynamics and future trends.
    Major U.S. beef supply chain disruptions over the past two 
years have sent the cattle and beef industry into uncharted, 
but explainable territory. The imbalance of excess market-ready 
cattle supplies in the face of reduced operational packing 
capacity has put downward pressure on cattle prices. Meanwhile, 
consumer demand for beef and all animal protein has reached 
record levels, fueled by pandemic stockpiling, increased and 
reallocated consumer income, and more recently, restaurant 
reopenings, not to mention export demand. These dynamics, 
combined with elevated processing costs, have increased the 
spread between beef price and cattle price, just as economic 
principles, past research, and historical market relationships 
would suggest. Both the direction and magnitude of the price 
spread are well within the range of expectation.
    Like many businesses, the pandemic has created enormous 
challenges for cattle producers. Seeing the price difference 
between cattle and beef has only added to that emotional 
strain. I understand the frustration. I have owned and bred 
cattle most of my life, and I have friends and family that make 
a living ranching and feeding cattle. However, with 
stakeholders that are invested throughout the entire supply 
chain, from rancher to packer to retailer, I have to look at 
the beef industry from an objective and analysis-based 
perspective.
    First, cattle are not beef. Cattle are one of several 
inputs into beef production. Other major inputs include labor, 
physical capital, and technology. These inputs are always 
seeking, but never finding, the perfect balance between one 
another. This creates cycles. Input imbalances are communicated 
through prices, whether that is cattle prices, wages, or 
investment. Over the past several years, extreme and unexpected 
events have severely restricted several of these inputs, for 
example, facilities in the August 2019 Tyson plant fire and 
labor during the pandemic. A working market sends price signals 
to adjust. These same price signals created record high cattle 
prices and record packer losses in 2014 and 2015.
    The biology and natural time delays of the beef industry 
make it slow moving and capital intensive. Adjustments take 
years. While recent, unforeseen events have exacerbated the 
situation, free market signals, economic losses, drought, and 
the natural cattle cycle laid the foundation for today's 
circumstances over several decades.
    Beef packing has historically been a low-margin business. 
In the year 2000, with total cattle population of 98 million 
head, the U.S. harvested nearly 30 million head of fed cattle. 
By 2014 and 2015, the total cattle population was below 90 
million head, with 2015 fed cattle slaughter under 23 million 
head. Throughout this period of largely drought-induced beef 
cow herd contraction, the most inefficient packing plants were 
driven out of business as competition for limited cattle 
supplies drove cattle prices to record highs. From 2000 to 
2015, the U.S. beef industry experienced a net decline of 
roughly 14,000 head per day in fed cattle processing capacity.
    Even before the extremes of 2020, recent margins suggest 
that there is opportunity to add packing capacity. However, 
that opportunity does not come without significant risk. First, 
the upfront cost of a new or expanded plant is extremely 
expensive. Industry sources estimate cost of $100 million to 
$120 million for every 1,000 head of daily capacity. Increasing 
construction costs over the past year likely put current costs 
even above that estimate. Then a new endeavor must meet 
regulatory requirement, build a labor force, and keep enough 
cash on hand to absorb losses. It is not just about building 
facilities. It is about building a business model.
    In response to the described market signals, numerous plans 
for greenfield plants or expansions of existing facilities have 
been unveiled in recent months. These plans come from new 
entrants, minor incumbents, and major incumbents alike. If all 
the announced plans for construction and expansion come to 
fruition, roughly 8,000 head of daily fed cattle capacity and 
nearly 2,000 head of non-fed capacity could be added over the 
next five years. Recognizing current drought conditions, if the 
beef cow herd declines by less than, say, two percent, there is 
opportunity for profitability with 5,000 head per day of 
expansion.
    A note of caution. There is a point where industry 
expansion goes too far and does not withstand tight cattle 
supplies. The long-term cattle cycle, drought risks, and market 
fundamentals must be considered.
    Technology implementation will also be a critical component 
of future success. Recently, many packers have revitalized 
their focus on technology and development as a means to address 
these labor challenges, manage costs, and reduce product waste. 
Enlightened by the pandemic to the longstanding labor shortages 
in the meat industry, many startups are also bringing outside 
expertise and perspectives to advance technology and automate 
the supply chain.
    In closing, the shocks of the beef industry over the last 
couple of years have presented the entire beef supply chain 
with enormous challenges. The resulting price movements have 
been frustrating, to say the least. Yet these same price 
movements and supply chain disruptions have accelerated 
investment in packing capacity, new technologies, and new 
business strategies that will help keep the beef industry 
evolving toward changing demands, and that is the market at 
work. Thank you.

    [The prepared statement of Mr. Aherin can be found on page 
69 in the appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much.
    Dr. Hendrickson.

  STATEMENT OF DR. MARY K. HENDRICKSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, 
 DIVISION OF APPLIED SOCIAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, 
                       COLUMBIA, MISSOURI

    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you. Thank you, Chairwoman Stabenow, 
Ranking Member Boozman, and members of the Committee. I really 
appreciate the opportunity to speak about the social impacts of 
market arrangements in the cattle industry.
    As a rural sociologist, I am concerned about the impacts 
that market arrangements have on people, on people and their 
communities. My concern centers around these relationships, the 
impacts of market organization on relationships between 
farmers, consumers, and communities, in effect the social 
infrastructure that can make our food system and our 
communities resilient. This leads me to focus on the broader 
impacts of competitive markets.
    Now competitive markets exist when no one seller, no one 
buyer can influence the marketplace. It means that no actor has 
the power to define choices or prices or ways of participating 
in the marketplace. Competitive markets encourage a diversity 
of organizational forms and they encourage multiple linkages 
across actors. They can also decentralize decisionmaking over 
food.
    The power to make decisions about what food is produced, 
how, where, by whom, and who gets to eat it, has become 
increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people that are 
located in transnational agrifood companies. As has already 
been stated, the four largest beef packing firms were 
responsible for 85 percent of U.S. steer and heifer slaughter 
in 2018. Four of the largest cattle feeders have a one-time 
capacity to feed over 2.5 million head. This is in contrast to 
the over 750,000 cow-calf farms in the U.S. that have an 
average herd size of about 48 head.
    Now when looking for a profit, these producers are also 
concerned with their autonomy and well-being as well as their 
other relationships with farmers and the community.
    What are the impacts of consolidated decisionmaking in the 
cattle industry as well as in the larger food and agricultural 
sector? At the farm level, agrifood consolidation reduces 
farmer autonomy. It means fewer choices for farmers about where 
they market their animals. My colleague, Harvey James, and I 
have argued that fewer market options constraints, as in limits 
or inhibits, the decisions of farmers. It constrains, as in it 
compels or obliges, them into decisions they might not 
otherwise have made. We have also argued that basic agrifood 
liberties, such as the freedom to negotiate and dictate terms, 
or the freedom to know, can be constrained when agrifood 
markets are consolidated.
    As I stated, I am particularly concerned about social 
relationships and communities. Rural sociologists conducting a 
meta-analysis of the relationship between agricultural 
structure and community well-being found detrimental effects in 
82 percent of the 50 studies they reviewed. A Missouri farmer 
once told me, ``I used to look around to see if any farmers 
were getting out of farming, so I could get their land to farm. 
Now I look around and I see I have no neighbors.''
    Anthropologists at the University of Kansas showed that a 
consolidated agriculture without people has depopulated western 
Kansas with an accompanying collapse in social relationships. 
Researchers in Europe have shown that less concentration of 
agriculture production enhances social cohesion, and that is 
the glue that allows groups and communities to accomplish their 
goals and dreams.
    This pandemic has shown us a number of flaws in our food 
system. I want to highlight that worker health and well-being 
are very important indicators of food system sustainability, 
and both were severely impacted by COVID-19. There was a strong 
relationship between proximity of livestock plans and the 
incidence of COVID-19 over time. Many of these processing 
plants were shut down due to COVID-19 infections, causing a 
backup of live animals to be slaughtered. Now these animals 
have to be fed, raising costs for farmers, or, in some cases, 
euthanized, which causes economic and psychological harm. There 
are ecological concerns about animal welfare and the waste of 
natural resources, such as the soil and water embodied in those 
animals.
    Now what can we do? I do not believe that there is any one 
approach, at any given scale, that will prove effective. 
Instead, we need a combination of actions, strategies, and 
policies at multiple levels that are ecological, democratic, 
and equitable, within and across populations, generations, and 
species, and this is the way we are going to build redundancy 
and provide fallbacks when some organizations or networks fail.
    I thank you for this opportunity, Madam Chairwoman, and I 
look forward to answering any questions.

    [The prepared statement of Ms. Hendrickson can be found on 
page 82 in the appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much, and we appreciate 
very much the input from all of our witnesses today.
    Mr. Tupper, let me start with you today. As a producer and 
a livestock auction operator, which we have now had a 
demonstration of, which we appreciate, you see the negotiated 
cash market up close. What impacts do you see in the actual 
sale barn when there are fewer packers and other participants 
bidding on cattle during an auction?
    Mr. Tupper. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, for the question, 
and I respectfully disagree with many of my colleagues that 
spoke after me about what that is. As we talk about shackle 
space and limiting the amount of packers that play, they talk 
about efficiencies that these big packers can make. What we 
give up in efficiencies, we would get back in competition. 
Every time that we gain efficiencies, we lose competition.
    I think that when we talk about whether shackle space is 
the most important thing, under their scenarios, it concerns me 
and my producers that the only way we can make money is if 
there is less cattle than there is shackle space. That is their 
theory, that shackle space is the only thing that can determine 
whether we can be profitable, and I respectfully, definitely 
disagree.
    We need more players in the marketplace and competition is 
huge. We would definitely give up some of those efficiencies to 
have more competition.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Dr. Tonsor, to 
followup on this, when fewer packers are participating in these 
markets we often hear concerns about market transparency, 
because live cattle prices do not get reported, due to USDA's 
current confidentiality rules under livestock mandatory 
reporting. Do you have any suggestions on how those 
confidentiality guidelines could be improved?
    Mr. Tonsor. Yes, I do. My first response would be as a 
point of clarity, is covered packers have to submit information 
to USDA, and regardless if there is one, two, or five it all 
gets submitted to USDA. The distinction that is important is 
what does or can USDA do with that information. That is part of 
the transparency discussion. It all gets reported to USDA. Not 
all of it shows up on a report to the public, depending on how 
confidentiality is approached, is what I am trying to make 
clear for this body, first and foremost.
    The 3/70/20 rule is the common confidentiality approach 
that is used by USDA. I noted, in my written testimony, that 
should always be--not always, periodically--re-examined. There 
is a history of a different approach being used. At the end of 
the day, anything that USDA does when it comes to implementing 
LMR is a tradeoff between aggregation and precision. You can 
aggregate across more categories to get more buyers and more 
types of transactions, to make it more likely you can report, 
but then you have the cost of precision.
    A simple example I offer in my written testimony is maybe 
aggregating steers and heifers by definition would add volume, 
rather than trying to report them separately. That alone may 
not get you another buyer, but that is a simple example that 
this body can relate to. I encourage more of those things to be 
considered.
    The second thing, real quickly, is as it relates to the 
data that is submitted, currently that is done on a whole-State 
basis--so the State of Kansas is one unit, State of Nebraska is 
one unit, and so forth. Something that is worth thinking about 
is whether or not that could be submitted on a more precise 
level, so think sub-States of a State or even zip code or 
something, which potentially--and please note, I am saying 
``potentially''--would allow USDA to report differently and 
address confidentiality that way. Their hands are sort of tied 
by the way data is shared with them at the whole-State level, 
currently. Thank you.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Dr. Hendrickson, 
I really appreciate your perspective as we think about how we 
are going to move forward after the pandemic, and in announcing 
the framework for funding to improve resiliency in the food 
supply chain, the USDA identified four pillars of focus: 
supporting production, improving processing, investing in 
distribution and aggregation, and creating new market 
opportunities. I am wondering, what are some of the factors 
that you think that the USDA should consider as they design the 
program so that we can assure these investments have real 
impact and sustainability in the long run?
    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you, Chairwoman Stabenow. One of the 
things that I think USDA needs to consider as they design this 
program is how will they build in redundancy and resiliency. 
One of the things that we saw with the pandemic is that we had 
a very brittle food supply chain, not just in cattle but across 
the board. We had a very brittle food supply chain. We know 
that local and regional farmers and businesses were much faster 
and more nimble at responding to the impacts of the pandemic 
than were far-flung supply chains.
    What we need to do is to figure out how we are going to 
build in failsafe mechanisms. How can we have a redundancy in 
processing? These should be priorities as USDA focuses on 
processing, on aggregation, and so on.
    I think it is important to regionalize the food system, to 
find ways to regionalize the food system so we are not as 
dependent on these North American or global kinds of 
production-consumption relationships. Thank you.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Senator Boozman, 
for your questions.
    Senator Boozman. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Gardiner, we 
have all heard about the devastating impacts the Holcomb 
packing plant fire and the COVID-19 pandemic had on many cattle 
producers. Can you describe your personal experience weathering 
these events?
    Mr. Gardiner. Yes, sir. Thank you, Senator. You know, in 
this business we all deal with risk all the time, so we work to 
lay off risk with forward contracting, hedging, and placing 
cattle at different times. I often talk about our management 
and our genetics, and the access to these places, based on that 
quality alone, gives us systems that allow us to hit those 
targets at varying times.
    Yes, that delayed it. That made a bottleneck. Our 
relationships with these people allowed us, through the 
pandemic. I will go back to a year ago right now. They were 
able to take away all of the discounts on our grid, and they 
incentivized us and helped us get through that. Many of the 
other processors were offering a base price of 95, and our base 
price, for all those cattle, cash included, was $1.15.
    I think when we look at these things, by nature cattlemen 
are the ultimate optimists, but they are the ultimate gamble. 
With weather, drought, market access, and all of these things, 
it is almost like with the fire, the pandemic, and now the 
ransomware, what else can they hit us with.
    We have to be flexible, and the flexibility of all of these 
things have allowed us to manage risk.
    Senator Boozman. Dr. Tonsor, can you explain the risks and 
benefits of alternative marketing agreement use and the risks 
and benefits of a mandated volume of cash market trade? Then 
also, you talked a lot about data and things and the importance 
of that. Have the risks and benefits of both of these topics 
been clearly quantified?
    Mr. Tonsor. Of course, it is hard for an academic to answer 
that in the short minutes here but I will do my best. The 
benefits and costs of AMAs themselves have been studied 
extensively over time by economists. To summarize and keep it 
jargon-free, most of the economic benefits have come down to 
helping coordinate, so efficiencies of knowing I have a place 
to send my cattle, efficiencies of knowing cattle are coming 
in, from both the buyer's and seller's perspective, are 
substantial. That makes our system more efficient, is what is 
underneath that statement, as well as aligning the demand 
signals.
    I made the comment about proliferation of beef products. 
There are a whole bunch of different beef products that go into 
those three different market channels that I alluded to. Some 
of that goes back to asking for cattle to be bred differently, 
raised differently, conveying information with them, and so 
forth, but does not align well with the spot market, 
traditionally. A lot of the economic benefits on the demand 
side align with use of AMAs. That would be my main response on 
the AMAs.
    What is the benefit and cost of bumping up cash spot or 
mandating cash spot, was the second half of your question. I 
think an honest answer is economists have not quantified those 
costs very well yet. I could just give you a personal opinion, 
because that is the best I can do as long as I am transparent 
on that, is I get concerned when we add rigidity to a system 
and we get in the way of people being entrepreneurs and doing 
things a little bit differently. Any kind of government mandate 
gives me that pause. Those who have heard me before know that 
is my M.O. that I respond to.
    My concern beyond that, that would certainly be a cost in 
this specific case, is the more we bump up cash share being 
required is exactly what would be done to just meet the specs, 
what would a negotiated trade look like, would it be different 
than formula and forward, and so forth. LMR, in many ways, was 
designed to be a price reporting as opposed to a regulatory 
effort, and that needs to be thought about carefully. Thank 
you.
    Senator Boozman. Very good. Dr. Aherin, there are several 
new beef processing plants that have been announced in the last 
year. Ranchers and feeders are investing in these facilities. 
In many instances, a greater degree of supply chain 
coordination through AMAs will be utilized to procure the 
cattle for these plants. Can you speak to why these new market 
entrants may choose to pursue AMAs over the others? If a 
certain volume of cash trade were mandated, what might the 
impact be on these new facilities or other investors 
considering entering the business?
    Mr. Aherin. Certainly. I think it is important to look at 
how a lot of these new plants are being designed. They are 
being designed around niche markets, product differentiation, 
because they are not going to be able to compete in terms of 
economy of scale and efficiency, with the large incumbents. 
They have to separate themselves based on product quality and 
really truly meeting consumer demands.
    If you have specific specs in the beef that you are looking 
for, you have to have specific specs in the cattle that you are 
looking for as well. To guarantee that you have enough cattle 
and you have identified suppliers of the cattle that meet those 
programs, you are going to want a strong relationship with your 
suppliers. One of the best ways to build those strong 
relationships is through AMAs.
    If cash were mandated in this situation it would severely 
hamstring the ability for these smaller, regional plants that 
are likely going to have to compete in niche markets to be able 
to differentiate themselves from the large, more efficient 
incumbents.
    Senator Boozman. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. I believe we have 
Senator Klobuchar with us, virtually. Senator Klobuchar.
    Senator Klobuchar. That is right. Thank you very much. 
Thank you to all the witnesses. Such important issues. I just 
want to start out with a quick question to Mr. Tupper. The 
pandemic painfully exposed high risk to our food supplies. 
Senator Moran and I worked on the RAMP-UP Act, that was 
included in the December relief package, to help small plants 
with inspection and get the inspections they needed and the 
like.
    How does having a more diversified meatpacking industry 
help improve resiliency in our food chain, because clearly the 
pandemic showed some of the problems.
    Mr. Tupper. Thank you, Senator Klobuchar. I think having 
more small and regional packing plants is huge, but I think 
that we have to look at it as more than just shackle space. 
They have to be sustainable, and we have to make sure that they 
are able to succeed. We have a history, in building some small 
and regional plants, of it taking three or four different 
owners before they can be prosperous. I think another onus on 
those small plants is when they go to sell that meat, or try to 
get their market share, it is very difficult when you are 
dealing with four major packers that are ready to squeeze you 
out at any time, because you are trying to take a share of 
their business.
    I think it is important, and I think it is definitely 
better for the security of our food system to have more small 
and regional packers, but we have to, besides just build them, 
we have to be able to make sure they can succeed.
    Senator Klobuchar. Okay. Very good point. Thank you for 
that. In Minnesota, around 90 percent of our cattle leave the 
State for processing, and cow inventories have outpaced 
processing. We would like to make this work better. I guess I 
would go to you, Dr. Tonsor. What barriers prevent the 
expansion of livestock processing capacity?
    Mr. Tonsor. Thank you. It has been alluded to. There are 
many economic drivers of why we have the packing processing 
sector the way we do today. Economies of scale is the most 
often noted one. I have used the term ``efficiency'' at least 
three times already today. That simply means the larger 
operations have a cost advantage per unit, to keep it jargon-
free.
    I will also note that something that has been added, in my 
opinion, in the last probably 20 years, with the proliferation 
of additional beef products, is economies of scope. The ability 
to not only produce a high volume and be cost efficient to run 
the plants efficiently, but also to be able to sustain large 
volumes of multiple types of beef products must be noted, and 
that is something that a smaller operation will have as a 
challenge.
    You can look at that as an opportunity or a threat. You 
cannot compete with bigger operators on everything, is the 
point of that. My colleagues to my left noted that as well. You 
have to narrow your business, and I think that is harder if you 
are new entrant in a small, medium-sized place, when you are 
facing not only economies of scale but economies of scope, for 
a lot of current incumbents.
    Senator Klobuchar. Okay. Very good. I am working with the 
Antitrust Subcommittee on a number of pieces of legislation, as 
some of you may know, which would be helpful, I believe, in 
this market, with being more pro-competitive and changing some 
of the standards we use to analyze not just mergers but looking 
backward at what is happening in industries. We are also going 
to be holding a hearing coming up soon on meatpacking as well 
as the food supply chain in Judiciary, that I am helping to 
head up.
    Mr. Tupper, how important is it that the agencies continue 
to investigate the current cattle market dynamics and provide 
updates of their findings, whenever possible?
    Mr. Tupper. Thank you again, Senator Klobuchar. I think 
very, very important, and we thank USDA and Secretary Vilsack 
for his willingness to work on these issues. He has stated that 
he is wanting to look at the Packers and Stockyards Act, and we 
definitely need these investigations into the antitrust 
theories to come out.
    One of the questions that always gets asked, in a free 
market system, why aren't any of the big four packers trying to 
gain more market share, if it is truly a free market system? 
Why are they not trying to gain market share upon each other? 
That is something that always comes to mind.
    Yes, we definitely encourage and appreciate your work on 
that, trying to get these antitrust legislations worked 
through.
    Senator Klobuchar. All right. Well, thank you very much. 
Thank you, everyone.
    Senator Boozman.
    [Presiding.] Senator Marshall.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you, Chairman, and again, welcome 
to all of our witnesses. I will have my first question for Mark 
Gardiner. Mark, I would like for you just to share a little bit 
about the story of U.S. Premium Beef. What were the ag 
economics like when you made the decision to do that, and as I 
recall it was basically cattle producers that formed this 
packing plant.
    Mr. Gardiner. Thank you, Senator Marshall. It was very 
similar to some of the things we are talking about today. As I 
mentioned in my testimony, we were--one out of four steaks 
ain't bad. Our product was terrible. We were losing market 
share at a rate that Dr. Harlan Ritchie of Michigan State 
University wrote a paper that said five years to meltdown. At 
the rate we were losing market share, we were not going to be 
relevant in the protein business.
    I was 35 years old. We were scared to death about 
investing. It has been mentioned oftentimes about investing in 
our community and investing in our infrastructure. We wanted to 
put some skin in the game to understand what made cattle 
better. We made the investments, we made that purchase of a 
percentage of National Beef as a group of 470-plus 
stockholders, because our cattle were not very good. Ours were 
not any different than the rest of them.
    When we went about doing that, all of a sudden, and we got 
that information on each and every animal, we started to learn 
what we needed to do to align our supply with consumer demand. 
My biggest view of the problem at the time was one price fits 
all, and that is part of the discussion today on the cash 
markets. It is very thin, but you are pricing everything on the 
average. We wanted to go to value-based systems that valued 
each and every animal, and this was successful because all of a 
sudden when you realize your animals are not hitting those 
targets we changed our genetics, we changed our management, we 
changed our feeding strategies, and we have vertical 
coordination of information to help all of us become more 
profitable.
    The realization that the beef industry was in so much 
trouble, losing market share, and our product was not very 
good, that is what changed it to where we have more beef demand 
today. That is what we have done, and our cattle have led the 
charge of improving the quality of the beef cattle in the 
United States.
    Senator Marshall. Thanks, Mark. Dr. Tonsor, maybe I will go 
to you next. Everywhere I travel people tell me that American 
beef is the best product on the market, that there is no one 
else that can compete with them. Even if the Australians maybe 
could beat us on price, the quality of our beef is what drives 
it. There are huge export opportunities across the world for 
more markets.
    If we lost this value-based system that we have now, how do 
you think it would impact those export markets?
    Mr. Tonsor. Yes, thank you for the question. Remember in my 
testimony the three different market channels, so domestic food 
service, domestic retail or grocery, and export?
    Senator Marshall. Yes.
    Mr. Tonsor. We send different products to those three 
channels. That is part of what you are alluding to and remind 
this body. Beef products find the market where they are most 
valuable. I would be concerned, to answer the question 
directly, if we erode incentives to have quality enhancement in 
the industry, at what point does the U.S. lose its current 
comparative advantage and high-quality beef?
    That would not happen overnight, right, because some of 
those things are genetic--feed, management, reputation. Some of 
those have long legs. We need to think through, very carefully, 
what the economic signals are for each one of those steps and 
what that signals to consumers.
    Eventually, I would think you would lose market share not 
only in the export market but domestic food service and 
domestic retail, because all three of them, you are competing 
with other proteins. Sometimes it is beef, sometimes it is a 
non-beef, but it is a protein marketplace globally.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you for that answer. Then, Dr. 
Aherin, my phone has blown up like it has never blown up 
before. Friends that I have grown up with since I was a child, 
people in the ranching industry, folks that own small feedlots, 
cow-calf operations just concerned about this situation. 
Feedlots that I have known, again, for decades, where there 
used to be 10 or 15 buyers, are having one person show up and 
offer a price. The sale barn that I worked every week in, from 
the time I was 16 until I was 20, used to have dozens of buyers 
show up, and now there are only two or three, maybe four buyers 
show up.
    What would you tell them the why, how come that is where we 
are today?
    Mr. Aherin. There is not an easy answer to that, but I 
think a lot of it has been alluded to the fact that the 
industry has moved toward these value-based marketing systems 
where we can reward cattle based on their different quality 
traits.
    One point that was mentioned earlier today, that I think 
helps explain this some, cash trade as a percentage of total 
transactions really has not changed since 2014, 2015, but what 
has changed is price. Cattle prices were at record highs in 
2014 and 2105, and then they have been challenged recently, but 
yet that negotiated trade level really has not changed. What 
has changed over that time is the supply relative to demand for 
those cattle.
    I want to emphasize one thing that we have kind of danced 
around, is that consumer demand is really what drives the price 
and the value of these animals, but it is processing capacity 
that allows that demand to trickle down to the cattle feeder, 
to the cow-calf producer. While there might be great consumer 
demand in today's market, it is not necessarily trickling down 
to the cattle feeder in the same way that it did in 2014, 
because of that oversupply of cattle relative to packing 
capacity. That is going to change. Over the next several years, 
the cow herd will likely decline. We are in a drought 
situation, liquidation phase. It is frustrating from an optics 
standpoint, but we are in a national market where total supply 
and total demand really drive price.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you, and I yield back.
    Senator Boozman. Senator Gillibrand.
    Senator Gillibrand. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking 
Member. In New York, there is a very high demand for increasing 
processing capacity at small facilities, and farmers are often 
booking slaughter dates several months or over a year in 
advance.
    On Monday, USDA announced their new Meat and Poultry 
Inspection Readiness Grant Program to assist small and medium-
sized transition to USDA FSIS inspection, and I am hopeful this 
program will meet the needs of the processing facilities in New 
York.
    Mr. Tonsor, with the consolidation in processors, this has 
led to a decreased buyers and processing options as well as 
increased opportunities for market disruptions if just one 
facility goes offline. Outside of the aforementioned grant 
program, what other options need further exploration to 
increase capacity at smaller facilities?
    Mr. Tonsor. There are a whole host of governmental 
discussions around subsidizing grants, you know, increasing 
access to credit and the like. Those all have a place there. I 
do not think it is my wheelhouse to advocate for one of those 
or not. I think just at the point in time you have a lot of 
society interest in that. Bodies like this can listen to that. 
That is my short answer.
    Senator Gillibrand. Thank you. Dr. Hendrickson, in your 
testimony you touched on the need for flexibility, particularly 
in areas like processing, and you also mentioned the social 
value of communities and neighbors. I have worked to invest in 
our rural communities and strengthen our local food systems in 
New York so that more food from New York producers can get to 
other parts of the State. You also point out the consolidation 
is an agrifood systemwide concern, in your comments, which is a 
sentiment that I share.
    First, can you speak more about how decentralizing and 
making our cattle market more resilient can also help our rural 
communities thrive? Second, can you elaborate about 
consolidation in the cow industry and its connection to 
consolidation in the dairy sector, and how this broad 
consolidation impacts family farms and consumers?
    Ms. Hendrickson. Yes. Thank you, Senator Gillibrand. The 
investments that we can make it regional food systems have a 
lot of impact on communities, farmers, food businesses. We have 
done some work around local food, economic impacts of local 
food, and we know that the economic returns stay in the 
communities and have a larger economic impact. There is quite a 
body of data on that, that shows that those returns are good 
for building the economic base of the community.
    My concern is on people and the social relationships, and 
what happens when we do decentralize, when we can build 
relationships between farmers and eaters, we start to build 
kind of this social infrastructure that I talked about earlier. 
That social infrastructure is really important and necessary 
for communities.
    One of the ways I will just point out, during the pandemic 
those cities that were able to use existing networks, strong 
networks that had a lot of social cohesion, they were much more 
effective in getting aid out to people who needed emergency 
food aid, for instance. That is just one example of the returns 
that we can have to social infrastructure.
    I do not think that this is just a cattle problem or a 
dairy problem, or a hog problem or a protein problem. What we 
see is consolidation across the board, and we need to really 
think about buyer power in that consolidation arena, and that 
starts with who is buying these food products--the Walmarts, 
the Whole Foods, the consolidated retailers. That is a buyer 
power issue, but it goes throughout the system. We see 
consolidation on the farm side. We see consolidation in 
processing, distribution, all of these things, and I think we 
have to address it in multiple fashions. I think one of the 
things that we need to think about is how are we going to 
create a diversity of ownership and control where consumers and 
farmers can negotiate these relationships that they want, that 
are socially important for them and their communities. Thank 
you.
    Senator Gillibrand. Thank you. Even though New York is not 
a large beef cow producing State, we do still have a fair 
number of beef operations, over 7,000 farms with over 100,000 
beef cows, according to the 2017 Ag Census. In addition, we 
also have a large dairy cow population, over 4,500 dairy farms 
with over 600,000 dairy cows, with many of those dairy cows 
eventually making their way to the ground beef market as cull 
cows, and finally, we have a fair number of veal calves 
originating from dairy farms.
    Over the past several years, dairy farms have begun to 
transition lower genetic quality dairy cows to beef to increase 
their profits for dairy calves. These calves are often then 
raised as feeder cow for the beef market.
    Mr. Tupper, how do smaller beef States like New York remain 
competitive and ensure that cow producers receive fair prices, 
and what are the potential opportunities to expand markets for 
retired dairy cows to be used as beef?
    Mr. Tupper. Thank you, Senator. I think you are exactly 
right. There is much more done in the dairy sector cross-
breeding to bring those cattle into the beef sector. I think 
ways that they can stay competitive is we have got to keep 
these markets fair, we have got to be able to make sure that 
bigger is not always better. The bigger the packer is, 
sometimes they squeeze out these small and regional packers 
that we are trying to build and get shackle space for.
    I think one of the main ways that they can stay competitive 
is make sure that they can get market share and that they can 
fairly be in that marketplace. I think that is the best way 
that we can keep them competitive.
    Senator Gillibrand. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Chairwoman Stabenow.
    [Presiding.] Thank you very much. As we go back and forth 
here to vote, hopefully everyone who is with us at the moment 
has voted on the first vote.
    Senator Tuberville.
    Senator Tuberville. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for 
being here today. You know, back in Alabama cattle production 
represents a $2.5 billion industry, so I am thankful we are 
having this today, because we have got a lot of our farmers and 
cattle growers in serious trouble.
    Let us start with Mr. Gardiner. Mr. Gardiner, your 
experience using alternative marketing agreements to compensate 
for the investment your family has made to improve the genetics 
of your herd is a compelling experience. Alabama is home to 
thousands of small cow-calf producers, and I am curious to know 
how these agreements can benefit producers like those in my 
State. Can you elaborate?
    Mr. Gardiner. Yes, sir. Senator, I would first thank you 
for the question, but I would stress that these AMAs that we 
have developed are actually the very best for the small 
producer, that have allowed them to take their genetics and 
take their managements, and being able to have that market 
access for those superior cattle and for that superior 
management. I think we have to look at the marketplace and we 
have to look at where do we fit into that marketplace and how 
do we go forward on a demand-driven market. I think when we 
look at a lot of the discussion--and I agree with much that has 
been said--the challenge for everybody, whether you are a cow-
calf producer or a processor, is how are you profitable. If you 
look back in history, 100 years ago we had lots more 
processors, and the blunt truth of the matter why they are not 
here today is they were not processors, they were not 
profitable.
    I work with customers every day. How do we change our 
management systems? How do we create cattle that somebody 
wants? How do we coordinate and align these beef cattle with 
consumer demand, which ultimately aligns with profitability? It 
takes organization, coordination, it takes working together.
    As we go back to one of the earlier questions, we had all 
these exact same problems. We still have them today. We work 
with, whether you are from Alabama, Kansas, or Alaska, how do 
we reach the market and how do we make all of these systems 
better, to be more profitable? I would stress that the absolute 
smallest producers have reaped the highest dollar per head 
value on our value-based grid, because they can hit those 
targets better than anybody else has. Quite frankly, that is 
what has kept my family in business, that is what kept our 
other families in business, and that is where we go, as we go 
forward.
    My concern is, with mandates, is all of a sudden I have 
spent all these years, as many others have too, I am mandated 
to go back to average pricing for one-price-fits-all, and that 
is why I think when we look at the information and the thinly 
traded cash market, and Dr. Tonsor alluded to it, if we can put 
all base prices, a formula grid and AMAs, into the mandatory 
price reporting, this is the base price and that becomes all-
inclusive, then we are going to have a more robust, more 
transparent market.
    Senator, I just would stress to you that when we know where 
those targets are and we align them with consumer demand, we 
are rewarded for it. Thank you.
    Senator Tuberville. Thank you. Dr. Tonsor, you know, back 
in my State beef cattle is second to buying broiler chickens. 
Can you explain how beef competes with other proteins in the 
market, such as chicken and pork? I would be particularly 
interested in your thoughts about AMAs and the role they might 
play as beef's overall competitiveness among other proteins.
    Mr. Tonsor. Sure. I do spend a lot of my time monitoring 
meat demand, and meat is broader than just beef, right, so 
multiple proteins, as you alluded to. Meat demand is high. It 
is not unique to beef. We must note that. Over time, some of 
the work I have done actually says what economists call ``cross 
price effect.'' The price change on pork and chicken has less 
of an effect on beef today than it did 20 years ago.
    My opinion on why that has happened is there is a quality 
distinction that has grown over that 20 years, and it is not 
just price. It is price and other considerations that make 
somebody switch from Protein A to Protein B, hence why we are 
here today. I think we, being the beef industry in that 
statement, there is a quality advantage in the eye of the 
typical consumer that justifies them paying more per pound, 
typically, for beef than they do for pork or chicken.
    If it is just simply a cost per pound of protein, then the 
protein that wins is simply who can produce that the cheapest 
and most efficiently. That is not something that is in the 
wheelhouse that is favorable for the beef industry, hence my 
comment on comparative advantage in my oral testimony. Over 
time, the beef industry has had a comparative advantage on 
high-quality, good eating experience, that has helped them 
position themselves well, compared to other proteins.
    Senator Tuberville. Thank you. Madam Chair, my time is up 
but I would like to submit a couple of questions for them to 
answer.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Absolutely.
    Senator Tuberville. Thank you very much.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Absolutely. Without objection.
    Senator Booker, and then we will have Senator Grassley. 
Senator Booker.
    Senator Booker. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. I 
would like to put some questions toward my friend, Dr. 
Hendrickson.
    You know, COVID really showed how fragile our food system 
is, and we saw our system really break down in pretty stunning 
ways. Consumers were paying higher prices for meat while 
ranchers, who were paid less for their cattle but the big, 
consolidated companies really made record profits. COVID did 
not create this problem. It really shined a light on what was 
going on. Many of the witnesses who testified talked about how 
there is really record concentration going on right now in the 
meatpacking industries. Companies like Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and 
National Beef control more than 80 percent of all the U.S. beef 
processing.
    I have been concerned about these extreme levels of 
concentration for years, and as you know have introduced a 
number of bills to try to deal with that, bills with multiple 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Senator Tester and I put 
together a bill that would stop these ag mergers, put a 
moratorium on them.
    I have introduced another bill, the Farm Systems Reform 
Act, which would make reforms to the Packers and Stockyards 
Act, including a prohibition on meatpacker ownership of 
livestock more than seven days prior to slaughter, and a 
requirement for meatpackers to buy at least 50 percent of all 
cattle from open-cash auctions. The bill would also address a 
problem that Mr. Tupper described in his testimony, and would 
stop the USDA from allowing imported beef to be deceptively 
labeled as products of the United States of America, which is 
so against the ideas I think that we have when we label 
something ``Product of the USA.'' At least it is deceptive to 
the consumer.
    I will be introducing legislation with Senator Lee to 
reform the Federal checkoff programs, which our ranchers are 
forced to pay into a program that is used to benefit the giant 
meatpackers.
    There is so much in the system that is clearly unfair, 
clearly working against producers, and driving many of them out 
of the market, and as you have talked about, hurting so many of 
our rural communities.
    Dr. Hendrickson, if we actually use the antitrust laws that 
we have today, I wonder if you can show what breaking up these 
companies and this unprecedented consolidation, what would the 
impact have on farmers and ranchers and those rural 
communities, and what the impact of stopping this kind of 
consolidation have on the resiliency of our food systems in 
moments of crisis, whether it be droughts or, frankly, what we 
just saw with COVID?
    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you, Senator Booker. I think the big 
thing about resiliency is that we have to have a way to have 
fallbacks or failsafe mechanisms, and what concentration does 
in the food system, it focuses on efficiency and 
specialization, and it does not say, oh, what is going to 
happen if we have like a pandemic or we have a disaster or we 
have these ransomware attacks? Everybody keeps saying that, oh, 
these are black swan events, but they happened and we were not 
very well prepared for them. We have to think about how we can 
prepare for them in the future.
    Resiliency requires a diversity of different kinds of 
forums, large-scale, small-scale, cooperatively owned, publicly 
owned, these kinds of things. It requires a lot of diversity in 
the system, and it also requires a different kind of 
connectivity, modular connectivity, where if you take out one 
node it does not crash the whole system.
    I think those are really important aspects of it. I am not 
sure that current antitrust law actually, the way it has been 
interpreted, it has been difficult for these kinds of questions 
about resiliency and fairness to be embraced within the current 
iterations of antitrust.
    I think we need to think, you know, some of the policies 
that you are talking about are potentially ways that we can 
have a system that really connects farmers and consumers, 
connects communities, and really pays attention to the 
ecologies in which these relationships take place. I think that 
is really important.
    Senator Booker. You know, we saw this in Upton Sinclair, in 
The Jungle. We are more concentrated than even at that time. 
Real quick, in the seconds I have left, the consumer impact 
also would be affected too, by a more diverse system. Correct?
    Ms. Hendrickson. That is right, and a lot of my fellow 
panelists have talked about consumer demand driving everything, 
but if consumers do not know about their food system, and most 
of the information about food, they cannot find it out. 
Anything we can do to make it more apparent for them to choose 
what they want, I think is really good.
    Senator Booker. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, 
Chairman.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you. Senator Grassley.
    Senator Grassley. Madam Chairman, I want to put an 
editorial on the record from the President of the Iowa Farm 
Bureau.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Without objection.

    [The letters can be found on page 191 in the appendix.]

    Senator Grassley. Okay. Second, I want to give a couple of 
takeaways so far from this meeting. We have got one witness 
that says we have a cozy setup, do not pass any laws to affect 
any of that cozy setup. That is not going to work for the 
farmers in my State that are mad about the $1,200 profit that 
the packers are making, and they get a low price compared to 
other people, and they have to wait 30 days, in some instances, 
to market their product. That is going to demand action by this 
Congress to take care of that unfair situation.
    The other takeaway is that I have not heard anybody justify 
the situation I just described, where farmers do not make a 
profit, the family farmer, and the packers make a $1,200 
profit, and there is no benefit to the consumer.
    My first question is to Mr. Tupper, being a cow-calf 
producer as you are. Over the past 20-plus years there has been 
a drastic shift in the purchase agreements, where, in the early 
2000's, more than 50 percent of the cattle were traded on a 
negotiated basis, but now it is only about 20 percent cash, 
maybe even less than that, I have heard. I have also heard from 
many Iowa cattlemen who fought to keep auction markets open and 
functioning as close to normal during the pandemic, because 
they are so vital to price discovery in the cattle industry.
    This question to you. Does captive supply create more 
leverage for packers to pay lower prices for fed cattle in the 
cash market, and how does the lack of cash trade ultimately 
impact livestock auction markets?
    Mr. Tupper. Thank you, Senator Grassley, and it definitely 
is a definite yes, it impacts it hugely. When the Big Four can 
have all of that captive supply, so they do not have to go out 
and compete for those cattle, then they can push down the 
prices.
    One of the other things that I would like to say to Mr. 
Gardiner, when we talk about the differences in cattle and 
prices, there used to be four or five buyers come out to your 
State and Iowa and look at cattle, and they could still buy 
those cattle on an up basis. They do not have to have an 
Alternative Marketing Agreement (AMA) to give more for those 
cattle. At any time, they can go to Senator Grassley's feedlot 
and say he has a superior set of cattle, and the base price 
that everybody else is given is $1.20, and they can bid them 
$1.25. I strongly disagree that that helps the market.
    I think the other part of your question is that if we had 
more competition out there and they could not hold captive 
supply, then when we have high boxed-beef prices, we would 
directly see the benefit of that. The argument that shackle 
space, and there is no question we need more, but we do not get 
to see the direct benefit of higher boxed-beef because we do 
not have competition and they can have captive supply. Thank 
you.
    Senator Grassley. Okay. Also, Mr. Tupper, you mentioned 
that alternative marketing agreements like formulas offer 
advantages to producers but that they also adversely affect 
price transparency, price discovery, price competition. Iowa 
leads the Nation in cash trade, nearly 60 percent, and they are 
frustrated that they are shouldering the burden.
    How do we know what cattle are worth in regions that do not 
have price discovery? Are small, independent producers offered 
the same opportunities to market their cattle as big producers 
do through formula contract?
    Mr. Tupper. I would say definitely they are not. We know, 
and we need a contract library that tell us this. Some of the 
big corporate feedlots are getting a different deal than the 
smaller farmer-feeder is. We cannot get those same deals. They 
are being offered those. I agree, some of the best cattle in 
the country are raised in your State, come from our State of 
South Dakota, and are fed in Iowa, and they do cash trade, and 
they are shouldering the burden for everybody else.
    All of those AMAs are set on a base price. If they are 
getting an up in the market, if the base price was higher than 
those AMAs may not look like quite so much. The whole base 
price, the whole of the fed cattle industry would get more. 
Thank you for the question.
    Senator Grassley. Dr. Tonsor, in your testimony you 
recognized the importance of reliable, accessible, and timely 
market information. Iowa cattle producers that I have talked to 
believe that the lack of cash trade in other regions and 
limited information reported due to confidentiality guidelines 
impede their ability to make well-informed marketing decisions.
    How can we make cattle market work more efficiently so that 
the small Iowa producer can compete with more transparency and 
agreements help independent cattle producers get a fair price? 
That is my last question.
    Mr. Tonsor. Thank you. In my written testimony--I saved you 
from it today because I only had five minutes in oral--I 
outline several candidate adjustments to LMR. My short response 
is please look at that list. Some of them get at the heart of 
we cannot tell, as an analyst, at the moment, how similar 
cattle quality are on formula versus negotiated. In many ways 
that is because the formula bucket is a catch-all the way it is 
currently operated.
    I think part of the honest answer to that is we need to 
pause and say, can we gather more information in a reasonable 
way, to make sense from an economist's benefit cost perspective 
of doing so to understand the differences in the type of 
cattle, the relationships, and so forth. If those prices are 
very similar once we account for differences in the cattle and 
the relationships, that is one thing. If they are not, that is 
a different thing. We do not know, until we understand more 
what is in that broader bucket. Currently the formula is a 
catch-all budget the way it operates.
    You will find, in my submitted testimony is an 
encouragement of looking at that.
    The second part, briefly, would be currently USDA reports 
ranges, min and max. I think there is an opportunity to report 
more on the price distribution. An example I used in my written 
testimony was maybe the 15th and 85th percentiles. Let us 
understand more about the distribution of prices, help both 
buyers and sellers--we are honing in on the seller perspective 
here, at the moment; I get that--gather more information on 
that whole distribution, some things like that are fairly 
feasible, in my opinion, given how things already work, if we 
could ask AMS to work with us to do that.
    Senator Grassley. Thank you.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much, Senator Grassley. 
We will turn to Senator Smith, who I believe is with us 
virtually, and then it will be Senator Thune and Senator 
Fischer. Senator Smith.
    Senator Smith. Thank you so much, Madam Chair. Thank you 
for this hearing, and to all of our witnesses for being with us 
today.
    Cattle producers in Minnesota tell me that they feel 
squeezed by this marketplace. The lack of transparency and 
competition means that cattle producers are making pennies on 
the dollar, in some cases. Meanwhile, consumers are paying more 
and more for beef while the big processors, which control, as 
Senator Booker said, over 80 percent of the market, are seeing 
soaring profits. This imbalance in the market is exactly why 
Senator Rounds and I led a bipartisan and bicameral letter 
asking Attorney General Garland to investigate these 
anticompetitive practices in the marketplace.
    I also just want to thank Senator Klobuchar, who has shown 
important leadership on this issue as well.
    I think that we do have a market concentration problem, and 
certainly the experiences of Minnesota calf producers, cow 
producers, cow-calf operations really bear that out.
    I want to just note I appreciated, Dr. Hendrickson, what 
you said a bit ago in response to Senator Booker's questions 
about how diversity contributes to more strength, more 
resilience, and more fairness in the market, and I certainly 
see that in the experience of the ag sector in Minnesota.
    I want to ask a question with a little bit of a different 
angle, and I am going to direct it to Dr. Hendrickson and also 
Dr. Aherin. I would love to know your take on this. It is hard 
for folks to make a living raising livestock, but it is 
especially hard for beginning farmers and farmers of color. 
Cattle producers are not just dealing with market concentration 
and the power of the big meatpackers but also they have got 
issues with land prices and hay prices and the general cost of 
living, which keeps on going up and up. The rising input costs 
make it especially hard for farm families that are just 
starting out, because they just do not have a lot of built-in 
equity. Then, on top of that, you have got the shortage of 
processing capacity for smaller processing facilities, and that 
becomes a real problem for beginning farmers and farmers of 
color.
    Dr. Hendrickson, let me start with you. Would you like to 
comment on this, and what you see as the relationship between 
this concentration, on the one hand, and then the challenges 
that beginning farmers and especially farmers of color have 
breaking in?
    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you, Senator Smith. I think one of 
the big problems we have in the food system today is that it is 
very capital intensive, and it is very difficult for those 
without capital to figure out a way to participate, and it does 
not have to be that way. We can do things that are less capital 
intensive. I know that a lot of folks have been talking about, 
you know, building processing plants, and so on, and that is 
pretty capital intensive. We have got to figure out ways to 
help people that do not have access to capital to get a part of 
that.
    One of the ways to do that, I think, is to do things 
cooperatively, to do things collectively, and we have a long 
history in agriculture of where we cooperatively work together 
we can make a lot of changes. For beginning farmers, the 
farmers of color who have been marginalized in so many 
different ways, and particularly in access to capital, I think 
that we really have to help those collective strategies, help 
them work together to access markets and to think about things 
in new ways.
    Senator Smith. Thank you very much. Dr. Aherin, would you 
like to comment on this? You were here representing the 
financial sector. Could you talk a little bit about how the 
current cattle market has impacted new farmers and what banks 
can do to help new farmers and farmers of color who 
historically have challenges getting access to capital, you 
know, how they can be assisted?
    Mr. Aherin. Certainly. My role, within the bank, is to 
really be a source of knowledge. I have colleagues in different 
sectors all across agriculture and all across the world, and 
really try to engage in information sharing and helping 
producers to identify potential new markets, help them build 
new business models.
    As it has been alluded to today, several times, consumers 
are more and more interested about where their food comes from. 
There is more and more interest in production practices and 
sustainability, and there are several of my peers who have gone 
back to their family operations and added a component of a 
different, kind of more of a niche market to maybe their 
family's operation or maybe started something brand new on 
their own, you know, being more engaged with the consumer and 
really helping to identify trends in the marketplace.
    Senator Smith. Thank you. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. 
I yield back.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Senator Thune.
    Senator Thune. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Tupper, help me 
understand a little bit here. You have heard some of your 
colleagues on the panel today talk about the prices are being 
simply a function of supply and demand. I think I heard you say 
that the livestock producer, in many cases, is generating a 
margin that may be 1 percent, and that packers were generating 
margins of 80 percent. I think that was, if I heard you right, 
in your opening remarks.
    If you have got a food chain, a food chain that consists of 
a producer, maybe in our part of the country it goes to a 
feeder, but to a processor, ultimately to a retailer and to the 
consumer, the consumer is paying, I think as it has been 
pointed out, record high prices, and the producer is going out 
of business, which means that the profitability in the middle 
of that food chain is hardly evenly distributed at all.
    Now if there is a true market, supply and demand regulating 
this, you would think that there would be some benefit that 
would accrue to the folks who are in that supply chain, and 
maybe at the end of the supply chain, or the start of it, 
however you want to look at it, and that is the producer.
    Could you just respond to the whole question, or I should 
say answer that has been given by some on the panel to the 
explanation for prices, that this is simply a function of 
supply and demand.
    Mr. Tupper. Absolutely, and I think you alluded to it in 
your question, that it really boils down to competition. When 
they do not have to compete--we can talk about shackle space 
and they can bring that up--that definitely is a factor, 
because then they can control it. They can control the chain 
speed, they control the price out the back door, as they are 
pricing the meat. The margins can be very disproportionate.
    I do not disagree that there are cycles. As we look back 
through the history of the cycles, how many farms and ranches, 
and how many small feedlots do we have to lose, every time we 
go through a cycle, just because it is just another cycle? 
Through that cycle, the Big Four corporate packers get filthy 
rich, and we squeeze out the small guy. Time after time, if you 
look through history, we have squeezed out the smaller guy. 
Bigger is not always better, and efficiencies should not always 
be given up for competition, and I think that is some of the 
things that get overlooked.
    Senator Thune. For a free market to work, you have to have 
competition, and from what I hear you saying--so I am trying to 
figure out, if we are trying to come up with solutions and 
answers to what is happening out there--there is volatility in 
the cattle market, these huge spreads that the packers continue 
to get, that are driving producer, the producer level, out of 
business--how do we fix that? It sounds like what I hear you 
saying is that there is a virtual monopoly--you called it an 
oligopoly, but a virtual monopoly--and there is a choke point 
there where there is not enough competition. Even though you 
had huge demand by the consumer, and you have adequate supply 
at the producer level, that is not making it through the food 
chain in a way that saves the consumer any money.
    Let me ask you a second question, because you mentioned 
something about having a second bidder. Talk to me, in your 
business, what that means, how that works.
    Mr. Tupper. Without question, when we have calf sales, 
especially in the fall which is the big time, many of our 
cattle move through South Dakota to eastern South Dakota, 
Nebraska, or Kansas, and we have to have that second bidder to 
decide what that price may be.
    I can tell you, as a sale barn owner, when we have one of 
these black swan events, it affects us directly too. If it is 
on a Friday at 2, and I have 6,000 bawling calves in my sale 
barn, and everybody is running scared because we have another 
black swan event, that falls on our shoulders, as auction 
market owners, to make sure that that market stays at a good 
place.
    The only way, in my opinion, that you can have any true 
price discovery is you have to have a second bidder. You talk 
to any of these small or medium-sized feedlots that do not 
already have an arrangement with a packer, they do not get a 
second bidder, and they cannot get one, and they tell them that 
you have to take this bid, because otherwise there is not chain 
or shackle space for you, so here it is. Or you can turn them 
in on the grid--and hear, ``we are not going to tell you what 
that price is until next Monday.''
    I think the real key that does not get looked at or 
analyzed is that the market power that the Big Four packers 
have dictates and controls the profitability through the whole 
sector.
    Senator Thune. Well, and if you do not have, if I might 
add, if you do not have a second bidder, you do not have 
competition, right? You have got a single buyer setting a 
price, and in this case a price that is making huge profits for 
one of those rungs in the food chain, if you will, at the 
expense of others, and particularly the person who is putting 
the time and the effort and the energy in the work, into 
raising that animal in the first place. Is that a fair 
assessment?
    Mr. Tupper. I think you are spot on in that assessment, 
Senator.
    Senator Thune. Okay. Madam Chair, my time has expired, but 
I would suggest that we have to figure out, as part of our 
deliberations, and whether that is in the form of legislation 
or working with the Department of Justice, to address this 
issue of lack of competition, and the fact that there is an 
oligopoly and that price-setting and market powers being 
misused in a way that disadvantages the very people that are 
out there trying to make a living on the land.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Yes, we have got 
work to do.
    Senator Fischer, and then Senator Hyde-Smith.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding 
this hearing. Before I begin I would like to request that 
Nebraska Cattlemen's testimony highlighting their concerns 
regarding the thinning levels of price discovery, lack of 
processing capacity, and the need to increase market 
transparency be added to the record.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Ordered, without objection.

    [The letter can be found on pages 192-194 in the appendix.]

    Senator Fischer. Thank you. I would like to start by saying 
that I am not claiming or arguing that more cash sales will 
improve prices for producers. I am concerned with price 
discovery, and I am concerned with market transparency.
    Many witnesses mentioned supply and demand impacts on the 
supply chain, the cattle market, and sector profitability. I 
spent over 40 years on a ranch in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. I 
experienced firsthand the drought, changes in herd size, and I 
saw smaller, regional packing facilities being shuttered around 
us. I understand the shift in the industry that occurred after 
2016, and how we find ourselves with more fat cattle and less 
shackle space. I also understand that no one could have 
predicted Holcomb of COVID-19.
    Mr. Tupper, I thank you for your testimony. I love your 
points on the second bidder, I love your points about the cow-
calf producer getting squeezed, but you left out our great 
Nebraska beef.
    Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Tonsor, Dr. Tonsor, I appreciate your 
testimoneys. In Nebraska, I represent every segment of the 
supply chain--cow-calf operations, backgrounders, feed yards of 
every size, we have packers of every size, including three of 
the big four. I understand that every region is different. What 
works in one State might not work in another. I see the merit 
in AMAs. I understand why they may be more popular in certain 
regions. I understand they provide greater economic returns as 
well as operational efficiencies, both for packers and for feed 
yards.
    In fact, that is why I have included a contract library in 
my legislation, to provide all producers who want to diversify 
their marketing but who were not lucky enough to have a seat 
the negotiating table, that Mr. Gardiner references in his 
testimony, and they can then have access to examples of what 
already exists in the marketplace.
    Dr. Tonsor, as the economist on the panel I am interested 
in your opinion on Mr. Gardiner's testimony where he States 
that his customers, on average, have earned $92.71 per head in 
premiums, above live-based market price, because of his use of 
a value-based system. Later in the testimony, he States that 
cash trades can be interpreted as the base price. If there were 
no publicly reported cash price for Mr. Gardiner to use as his 
base, he would not be able to determine that his cattle are 
worth that $92 more per head than his neighbor's cattle. Base 
price is important.
    Dr. Tonsor, you highlight the value of AMAs to market 
participants who choose to utilize them. How do you foresee 
these market participants setting the base price for these 
agreements in the future if the pool of cash participants 
continues to shrink?
    Mr. Tonsor. Thank you for the comment and questions. Two 
things come to mind. One is I think we honestly need to, as I 
noted also in my written testimony, assess if LMR can help us 
with the discovery and reporting and transparency component. 
That in itself does not change in the percentage that are 
negotiated, right? I think that has to be kept in mind as well, 
not that I have the magic list, but there are some potential 
helping points there.
    The second part would be--and other testimony alluded to--
there are other industries that have similar shocks, lumber 
industry and so forth, but I encourage us to go a little bit 
further also. There are a lot of other industries that have 
changed what their base way of doing business is. I do not 
think we are to that point tomorrow, so please do not overreact 
to my comment, but there are a lot of other sectors in ag to 
where the base that you used in how you do business is 
different today than it was 30 or 50 years ago.
    I encourage us to look forward as opposed to backward. I 
used that phrase in my oral testimony for a reason. At some 
point, I think the industry will use a different base. I think 
it makes sense, the best we can, to keep spot-negotiated, 
reported transparently and the like, but we need to also be 
open to, if there are ways to discover value for a commodity in 
a different way, over time, we need to be open to that. There 
are other sectors in ag that have done that. We are not going 
to do that tomorrow on fed cattle, but I encourage us to at 
least be aware of that evolution that exists.
    Senator Fischer. I would be interested to know how you 
would determine base in the future, because I think the cash 
sales are important. They provide information to those using 
AMAs. I do not think that they are receiving the value that 
they have, the economic value that they have in the system that 
we currently have. They are important to be able to know what 
the market price is, to have that transparency, the 
accountability in a system that should be benefiting every 
segment of this industry, from cow-calf producers, to my 
neighbors in South Dakota, close to the Sand Hills, to be able 
to have that across the board. We need every segment of this 
industry to be able to succeed.
    My time has expired, but I thank you. Thank you, Madam 
Chair.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Senator Hyde-
Smith.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Thank you, Chairwoman Stabenow, and 
thank you, Ranking Member Boozman. I am thrilled that we are 
having this hearing today. I have been so excited, looking 
forward to this, and I want to thank our panel of witnesses for 
being here.
    You know, I am pleased that the Committee has decided that 
we need to discuss price manipulation, collusion, restrictions 
of competition, and other unfair practices in the cattle 
market. I applaud American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall 
for establishing a Cattle Market Working Group in April 2020, 
to investigate and research the volatile activities in the 
cattle markets, and the findings and suggestions that resulted 
from that working group's research are quite informative, and 
it should be taken into consideration.
    What we have been seeing in the cattle markets--rock-bottom 
prices for fed cattle yet sky-high prices for boxed-beef--just 
defies the basic laws of economics, supply and demand, and we 
need some solutions. We need some solutions, and we need some 
answers, and we need to act upon this.
    Being a producer myself, as well as a family that operates 
a stockyard that has had a live cattle auction since 1942, I am 
getting hundreds of calls from producers, from beef cattle 
producers that are saying, ``Cindy, what is wrong with this 
market?'' They are seeing their prices they are getting and 
they are seeing what the prices are at the grocery store with 
boxed beef. Several of my colleagues have put forth legislation 
that would require USDA to establish a minimum mandatory 
negotiated trade in the cash markets by the packers. We have 
talked about many things, but I have never seen so many 
producers give me calls. They are busy. Right now they are in 
fields all across America, cutting hay, baling hay, getting 
ready to put it in the barn for winter so they can feed their 
cattle. My 87-year-old father-in-law, I assure you, is fixing 
fence right now, today, somewhere, because we are protecting 
our herd. We have got to be the voice to protect this industry.
    Mr. Tupper, your fellow panelists here, they seem to 
suggest that the AMAs are the solution to low prices being paid 
to producers. Tell me how an alternative marketing agreement 
between a feeder and a packer will benefit a cow-calf producer 
who unloads a gooseneck trailer-load at your barn every week. 
How would that benefit that producer?
    Mr. Tupper. It will not, you know, in short. There is no 
question that there can be some value, and we need to make sure 
that we get a good product out there. There are other ways to 
do it than just an AMA.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Well, I want to be here, because these 
producers cannot be here, and they know exactly what you just 
said. They know that. They do not have a seat at this table. 
Farm Bureau was not asked to be a panelist today, as I 
requested. I assure you, their chair at this table is not empty 
because I am sitting in it.
    Should this Committee continue further discussions on the 
legislative proposals in hopes of finding legislative solutions 
to bring greater price transparency to the market, Mr. Tupper?
    Mr. Tupper. Absolutely. We need to know. One of the big 
things, the big elephant in the room when you talk to these big 
feeders, the corporate feeder does not want you to know what 
price they get versus what price I get when I sell my fat 
cattle from my feedlot in Nebraska. I am going to throw in the 
Nebraska section, but they do not want to know the differences 
that that may be, what I can get versus what they can get.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. We have a lot of customers, you and I. 
They are being treated very unfairly right now, and I think 
that it is time for that to stop.
    My second question is for Dr. Tonsor. I have a little bit 
of time left. When an August 2019 fire knocked out one of the 
largest beef processing facilities in the country, in Holcomb, 
Texas--and boy, I remember the day, watching it on national 
news, and that smoke billowing out--cattle prices collapsed 
while wholesale beef prices rose 12 percent in a week. In seven 
days, wholesale beef prices rose 12 percent.
    During the COVID pandemic, the same trends were amplified 
and the effect was more widespread. At the height of the 
pandemic, wholesale beef prices were more than double the 
previous years, but those gains were never experienced on a 
rancher's level. Were available risk management tools 
sufficient for ranchers to manage their risks during these 
highly volatile events that we did not expect?
    Mr. Tonsor. I am not aware of a risk management tool 
against a fire at a plant if you are a producer, right, because 
that is a market access thing for something I sell. I am not 
aware of a tool that would be there for that.
    To answer the question, there are risk management tools for 
somebody that sells fed cattle or feeder cattle for just 
general price movement, whether that is a traditional hedge 
using CME products or whether it is a USDA livestock insurance 
product, or the like. Those tools do exist. That is probably a 
whole other separate discussion for a day. None of them are 
specific to a fire or a loss of packing capacity specifically.
    Senator Fischer. Well, I am out of time and I appreciate 
your answers, and I hope we have another round, because I have 
a lot more questions.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much, Senator Hyde-
Smith. Senator Ernst is next, and then Senator Hoeven, and 
Senator Braun.
    Senator Ernst. Yes, Thank you, Madam Chair, and thanks to 
our witnesses today.
    Dr. Tonsor, like you I grew up feeding hogs and walking 
beans, and those are the typical things us farm kids do on our 
family farms. I, of course, grew up in southwest Iowa, and I 
experienced firsthand the hard work that goes into production 
agriculture. Agriculture has long been the bedrock of our 
national economy, and Iowa certainly plays a critical part in 
ensuring folks have access to a safe and affordable food 
supply. Without transparency, we risk losing that fair, 
competitive pricing.
    What would you recommend to achieve greater transparency in 
the market, and how can the market send clearer signals to both 
our producers and our end consumers?
    Mr. Tonsor. My response would be similar to what I have 
given a couple of times, is I would encourage ongoing looking 
at how LMR works, and there is always room for improvement. 
Some of the things in my written testimony are easier, closer 
to the no-brainer kind of edge on that continuum. Others need 
further assessment. I made the comment about formula, 
transactions being kind of a catch-all category. I think there 
is room to potentially gather information better, so we 
understand what that is a little bit more. I cannot sit here 
and tell you more without additional information coming back 
out.
    That is my best response, is to pause, and there are 
periodic reviews of LMR. LMR has been around for 20 years. It 
is reauthorized roughly every five years. Part of what happens 
is looking at how that works. I would encourage us to seriously 
think about that and make sure we are, to the best we are able 
to while protecting confidentiality--that is embedded in my 
submission as well, and I think that is important to keep in 
mind--providing as much information on the market as we can.
    I think there are ways to do that without mandates on 
certain percent cash negotiated, and so forth. That is embedded 
in several of my responses that have come up today. Thank you.
    Senator Ernst. Thank you very much, and, Mr. Tupper, I am 
going to turn to you. My mother worked at a livestock auction 
when I was a young girl. She was not an auctioneer, but 
certainly every Wednesday afternoon she kept the books for the 
folks in Stanton, Iowa, and that was 1 day a week us kids did 
not have to ride the school bus home, so we loved it.
    Over the past 20 years, we really have seen a drastic shift 
in purchase agreement. Twenty years ago, over half of all 
cattle were traded on a negotiated basis, and today negotiated 
purchases account for just a quarter of all purchase. Instead, 
alternative arrangements like formula or forward contracts have 
become more prevalent. Formula transactions are less 
transparent, because they utilize base prices that are not 
publicly disclosed or reported.
    As a producer, can you accurately describe what is used to 
set the base price in these formulas, and then would knowing 
the base price and any premiums be advantageous for cattlemen?
    Mr. Tupper. Yes, and thank you for the question, Senator, 
and as an auctioneer we appreciate those secretaries. That is 
what keeps us in line.
    Senator Ernst. Yes. It is a good one. Thank you.
    Mr. Tupper. I think the base price is generally set in most 
of those AMAs, and there are very many different ones. You said 
it, there are very many different categories to that, so we do 
not know exactly what some of those are. The five-State 
weighted average is often used as the base price. So, as the 
packer can buy less than, as Senator Grassley pointed out, 20 
percent in the spot cash market, and use that to set the base 
price for 80 percent of the cattle that are sold in these AMAs, 
and then he can tell those guys that are getting AMAs, like Mr. 
Gardiner has alluded to in his testimony, that you make $80 or 
$90 a head, that is quite a significant move for the packer. 
They absolutely can control the base price and then give little 
incentives to a few of the cattle, and then keep the rest of 
the cattle at that base price level.
    I think when we set those base prices, that is where the 
bar has to get higher. We have a great product. We definitely 
need to segregate. I do not disagree that the better cattle and 
the better breeding and all the things that are put into that 
need to be rewarded. I think there are other ways to do it than 
just AMAs.
    Senator Ernst. Well, and I thank all of our witnesses for 
being here today. This is a tough issue, I think, for so many 
of us. Hearing all different sides coming together, certainly 
we hope to be able to sort through this and figure a way 
forward, certainly.
    Madam Chair, thank you very much.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. You are welcome. Thank you very much. 
Senator Hoeven.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Tonsor, boxed 
beef prices continue to rise, as we have discussed here. Live 
cattle prices are struggling to reach pre-pandemic levels. In 
your opinion, why is that?
    Mr. Tonsor. In my opinion, consistent with other peer-
reviewed research, is when you have the shocks we have had we 
would expect beef prices to go up and fed cattle prices to go 
down. That is what we have seen. The magnitude of what we have 
experienced stands out, and in many ways that is because the 
life experience, that I hope we are on the end of, has been 
very unique. That would be my short response.
    Senator Hoeven. Would reducing concentration in the 
meatpacking sector alleviate that trend?
    Mr. Tonsor. You are getting Tonsor's opinion. That is why I 
was asked here, so I as long as I remind you, that is Okay. 
There is an important difference between price discovery and 
price level. If you erode concentration in the spirit of more 
smaller facilities, maybe--and please note I said maybe--you 
help with some price discovery issues, like it depends on what 
else we do around that discussion. I also think you give up a 
lot of known economic benefits.
    Depending on how far you go with that argument, you are 
going to squeeze out--actually, you are going to shrink the 
size of the industry, because the beef cattle industry will be 
less efficient. I am not hiding the fact I noted the evoluation 
of industry was because of efficiencies. If you lose those 
efficiencies, you end up with a smaller industry.
    Senator Hoeven. What changes should be made to the 
Livestock Mandatory Reporting to improve pricing and 
transparency? What changes should be made?
    Mr. Tonsor. I cannot tell you one that has to be made. I 
think that is outside my wheelhouse. My written testimony 
listed out some that need serious assessment. Some that I think 
are easier to implement without giving up much is things like 
adding information on the distribution of prices. I think 
speaking to not just the min-max range, the 15th, 85th 
percentile, can add information to those that are wanting 
information, to negotiate differently or to understand the 
cattle type value and so forth. Those are fairly easy, so those 
are the ones I am most comfortable saying, and quote/unquote 
``should.''
    There are other ones that require changes in how the data 
is collected. I made the comment earlier, for a different 
Senator, is currently we have whole-State aggregation. The way 
the data is reported we know if that transaction was in 
Nebraska or Kansas or not. Potentially refining that would 
allow us to examine other ways to report that might help.
    Please note I said ``potentially'' and ``might'' as I am 
working through this continuum. There are several things that 
need to be evaluated. Some of these I am more comfortable 
advocating for--not like advocate for, I am just more 
comfortable they can be done without adverse impact. Others 
need to be examined more.
    Senator Hoeven. Do you think changes need to be made?
    Mr. Tonsor. I think some would be beneficial without 
substantial cost, and if they fall in that bucket then I would 
say yes.
    Senator Hoeven. For Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Tupper, you both 
noted the importance of price discovery in your testimony, but 
you disagree on how best to ensure adequate levels of cash 
trade to support that price discovery in the cattle market. How 
should we balance a producer's ability to use alternative 
marketing arrangements with the need to protect and improve 
price discovery? What do we do?
    Mr. Tupper. I will tackle that first. To me, one of the 
very first things we have to do is know what those agreements 
are. The contract library that Senator Fischer alluded to would 
be huge. That way we know what those are, though we may not 
know exactly what they are. I think one of the biggest ways we 
can do that is make sure we understand what the equal playing 
field is, and not just the big corporate feeders or the ones 
that have arrangements with certain packers, that all their 
cattle that go there can get that price, that the smaller 
feeder can get the same price.
    Senator Hoeven. Would all prices--what prices would go to 
that library? All prices?
    Mr. Tupper. One of the things now that is not reported is 
what those ups might be. We do not get to know, necessarily, in 
price reporting what one of those contracts that they may have 
or one of their exclusives that they may have to those. A 
contract library, if written correctly--because we have a 
contract library in hogs, so we have something to work from, 
and there are some problems there, and I think we can work 
through those--then we can find out what all of those market 
contracts are and what the true price that some are getting for 
those cattle are.
    Senator Hoeven. Including the AMAs.
    Mr. Tupper. Including the AMAs, yes.
    Senator Hoeven. Okay. Then, well, I guess, again, any other 
changes, but you would recommend the library, and then--so I 
had that for both Gardiner and Tupper. What other changes? Any 
other changes to the AMA?
    Mr. Gardiner. Senator, may I speak?
    Senator Hoeven. Yes.
    Mr. Gardiner. Yes, sir. I stated in my testimony and my 
written testimony, I think all of these things need to be 
included in there. The confidentiality has caused that to not 
be there. I think the base price is the base price, just as I 
sated with wheat. If we do have that transparency and we do 
have that there, then it is going to be a more robust price 
discovery.
    I will get disagreement, as I have all afternoon, but I 
would suggest to you if there was not a single AMA or a single 
formula--and again, like Dr. Tonsor said, this is Mark 
Gardiner's opinion--our price today on fed cattle would be the 
same. I am all about robust, transparent, put everything into 
what creates this base price, and that will allow us to hit 
these targets.
    One of the things I think about in this whole discussion, 
as we talk about producers and discuss this angst, this 
discussion, this worry that we all see in all of our families 
and our customers and just the whole industry, will lead us to 
a better place. I am asking that the industry go there and not 
be mandated, because you look back to these niche market 
processors, I am a niche market producer. We designed U.S. 
Premium Beef because we wanted to fit the niche to be rewarded 
for the things that we did.
    I happen to agree with Justin Tupper that I think all these 
things be disclosed, we will have a more robust price 
discovery, but I do not want to be inhibited on extra options.
    Senator Hoeven. Thank you. Madam Chair, sorry. I went over 
my time, but thank you for the indulgence.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. That is all right.
    Senator Thune. Madam Chair, could I submit for the record--
I have received input and consulted with South Dakota Stock 
Growers and South Dakota Cattlemen's Association. They 
submitted Statements. I would like to submit those for the 
record, if there is no objection.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Without objection, so ordered.

    [The letters can be found on pages 195-199 in the 
appendix.]

    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you. Senator Braun.
    Senator Braun. Thank you, Madam Chair. I am going to take a 
little different angle, because there is no doubt about it, the 
more transparency you have in anything, along with options, 
many people wanting to buy what you produce, and that is how 
you get to where, I think, markets really work. There should 
not be barriers to entry. You should have full transparency. 
You have to have enough entities on the buying end, because 
then you turn into what is called an oligopoly, to where they 
game the system.
    What I am afraid of is we have already gotten there. I have 
been the loudest voice trying to reform health care, and when 
you end up with only three hospitals in a market, we are going 
to go after transparency, and I think it would help there 
because there was zero in that place of our economy, where it 
costs us 20 percent of our GDP, and we never know what it costs 
us until we get our bill in the mail and open it up with 
trepidation. I think that is an issue, along with all the other 
things I mentioned.
    I want to look at the input side. Often, you know, you have 
got issues with selling your product, or you have got robust 
competition for it, with transparency. My question would be for 
Mr. Tupper and then for Mr. Gardiner.
    Corn, soybeans. I deal with several of them on land that I 
rent to farmers, and they complain to me about all of a sudden 
when corn goes up to $5.50, inputs follow right along. You are 
not dealing necessarily with more acres. You just got, again, 
the folks that you buy seed corn from, that you buy herbicides 
from, pesticides. It is not as broad a selection as you had 15 
to 20 years ago, when corn and soybeans cost maybe one-third in 
variable inputs what it costs now.
    Do you own your own farm, Mr. Tupper, grow silage to feed 
your cattle, or is that something you buy on the market, your 
corn that would go into silage?
    Mr. Tupper. For myself, we purchase most of that.
    Senator Braun. That is another way, when you are looking at 
ways to avoid markets that are not giving you choices on your 
inputs. There, at least, if you had ways to avoid inputs going 
up--have you had inputs go up on other things you need to 
fatten out your cattle? Has that gone up, or does it stay 
steady? Do you view that side of the equation as something 
where you have got choice and transparency as well?
    Mr. Tupper. I think we have seen exactly how you explained 
it. All those input costs have gone up, and one thing that 
happens in the ranching sector, when they see the rancher 
bringing money--I alluded to in my testimony--give money to the 
rancher, they will spend it faster than anybody. The costs go 
up in rent, just like you alluded to, and it never seems to 
fail, our costs would go up in seed costs and all through the 
sector.
    Senator Braun. It is getting squeezed on both sides of the 
equation. You have got more concentration, fewer options on 
selling what you produce, and fewer options to control your 
input costs along the journey as well.
    Mr. Gardiner, would you want to weigh in on that also?
    Mr. Gardiner. Well, I think that is all true. We raise 
wheatlage here and put that up, but our costs skyrocket too. 
When corn goes up, that adds cost to all of our feed stuffs and 
all of our inputs. At the risk of sounding like an economist, 
it is supply and demand. The reason that corn has gone up is 
because there was less of a supply and a worldwide demand, and 
I think that is a good thing for corn farmers. At the same 
time, all these other input costs, that is part of the risk 
management. That is part of the supply alignment, to hit 
consumers markets that have more value.
    We are actually, lots of us, saying the same thing in 
different ways. All I want is the opportunity to be able to 
compete, and know what those targets are, and when we do that--
and I think Justin is saying the same thing--if we have this 
robust price discovery, true supply and demand will go forward. 
Thank you.
    Senator Braun. I think the difference there--because I am 
about out of time--is the fact that your corn and soybeans, you 
are dealing with generally the same number of acres, give or 
take, that are produced.
    Seed corn, and all the inputs and things that go into that 
side of is, just because the price of corn goes up, because you 
have got a short supply, does not mean that the underlying 
inputs should. What is happening, across not only agriculture, 
it is happening across many other industries, we are no longer 
the markets that we used to have where it is full transparency, 
many participants in it, robust competition, and you end up 
with oligopolies, monopolies, high prices, and if you are at 
the bottom of the food chain you pay the consequences of it.
    Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. Because of the 
interest of members, we are going to allow another round of 
questions, if you are interested in doing it, if someone has a 
question or two. I think at this point the only thing I would 
like to ask is, Dr. Hendrickson, if there is anything further 
that you would like to share with us as it relates to 
resiliency and what we have talked about today and where your 
focus would be in addressing these issues.
    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you, Senator Stabenow. I actually 
think one of the things that we have overlooked is the power 
issue here and the power that comes with being able to control 
decisionmaking in the food system. Right now, those decisions 
are often controlled within the boards of directors, within the 
managers of these large food firms. It is not just in the 
meatpacking industry. It is within the supermarkets, like 
Walmart, it is within the corn traders, that Senator Braun was 
talking about, like Cargill and ADM. This power of the 
decisionmaking is something that has to be addressed if we are 
going to have the ability to implement a diverse number of 
options, nimbleness in the food supply chain so that people can 
respond in their particular place.
    I would also emphasize the importance of the impact this 
has on people. We have talked a lot about, well, the industry 
may be smaller or larger. We have talked about, you know, 
supply and demand. We are really not talking about what is the 
impact on people, their communities, and their ecologies. I 
think we have to keep that impact on people--farmers, workers, 
consumers. We have to keep that impact on people, front and 
center. People need to be able to make decisions about their 
food. Farmers need to be able to make decisions about where 
they are going to buy and where they are going to sell. That 
decentralization is absolutely imperative if we are going to 
have a resilient food supply chain.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you very much. We have with us--
Senator Boozman, I do not know if you would like to ask a 
question.
    Senator Boozman. Just very quickly. First of all, thank all 
of you for being here, either here or virtual. This really has 
been a good discussion, and a discussion that we need to have. 
And again, ongoing talks in the future.
    It sounds like we have got some consensus in regard to 
transparency, things like contract libraries, again, 
understanding price distribution, those kinds of things.
    Mr. Tupper, you mentioned that there might be other tools 
that can be utilized to pay for quality, aside from the AMAs. 
Have you got any ideas in that regard?
    Mr. Tupper. I do. It used to be, when I was a kid and we 
sold fat cattle, there were four or five buyers would walk on 
your yard, and they would walk through the cattle, and they 
would assess those cattle, and they would bid you a price, 
according not only to the market but according to those cattle.
    One thing I can remember as a kid, a term that used to come 
out at the sale barn, they called it ``grade and steal.'' I 
reflect back to that because that is what we are trying to do 
now. Mr. Gardiner alluded to we want to raise high-quality 
beef, and we want to get paid for that, and I do not disagree 
with that, and I do not want to sound like I do.
    What I am saying is there are very many ways to do it. They 
talk about efficiency. Many times today, the packer does not 
even send a buyer out to any of those feed yards, especially 
the smaller ones. They never even get a buyer to come out. 
Because of efficiencies they have eliminated those people they 
needed, the Big Four packers, so they do not have to send them 
out. They already do not compete against each other, so if they 
come to Senator Hyde-Smith's yard, they are only going to see 
one buyer. For some reason they drew the boundaries. I cannot 
tell you how many producers tell me they cannot even get one of 
the other packers to come bid, and whether that has been done 
anticompetitively, how do you prove that? I do not know, but 
that is what I hear out there. I think it is huge that we get 
that second bidder in the marketplace.
    Senator Boozman. Thank you very much.
    Chairwoman Stabenow. Thank you. I will call on Senator 
Fischer and then Senator Hyde-Smith.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Mr. Gardiner, I was going to ask you a question after Dr. 
Tonsor completed his, so I would like to touch base on one more 
thing, if I could. In your testimony, you make clear that the 
preferred route of addressing price discovery is through 
voluntary programs. You are against mandating. You also cite 
the ongoing industry efforts. I assume you are referring to 
NCBA's 75 percent plan. Is that correct?
    Mr. Gardiner. Thank you, Senator, for the question. I am 
certainly aware of that, but I do want a robust, transparent 
price discovery. The question of mandates--who is going to 
mandate them? If I want to hit these targets, who is going to 
tell me I have to sell cash or I have to sell this other way?
    I think the unintended consequences have challenges for all 
of us. We have talked about it, we need more processing, we 
need more shackle space, we need more buyers. I agree with all 
that. The reason they are not there is because, if we go back 
to those times that we all loved so much, in 2014 and 2015, 
when we had record-high cattle prices, it was because we did 
not have enough cattle. The cattle supply was there and they 
needed to fill that. Those processors are gone from that time 
period.
    The growth and capacity today is coming from this increased 
beef demand. When we put all of these things--and I will just 
call it a bucket--if we had 1,000 processors and they were all 
bidding on the cattle, my belief--and I will say it is my 
personal belief--the fed cattle price today would be the same. 
If we have that there, transparent, for everybody to see, and 
then we let the industry come together and solve these 
arrangements and solve this price discovery, then we are not 
mandated.
    Senator Fischer. Yes. You know----
    Mr. Gardiner. I appreciate the--go ahead. Yes, ma'am.
    Senator Fischer. I thank you for your comments, but the 
issue is we do not see voluntary reporting. We do not have that 
transparency under a voluntary method. With that 75 percent 
plan, there were many States that did not make the cut in the 
first quarter on it. That is the issue in trying to keep 
everything voluntary. I think when you compare, you know, what 
many of us are trying to do on this Committee to have that 
transparency, to have the information available to all 
producers so they can make wise market decisions, it is not 
going to happen on a voluntary basis.
    Mr. Gardiner. Senator----
    Senator Fischer. Thank you.
    Mr. Gardiner [continuing]. I am saying--I appreciate your 
comment. I would like to clarify that. I am saying put all of 
this in mandatory price reporting for full disclosure. 
Voluntary, I do not believe, is going to--you know, it has 
proven so far it is not working.
    Senator Fischer. Yes. Thank you, sir, very much. Thank you, 
Madam Chair--Mr. Chairman.
    Senator Boozman.
    [Presiding.] Senator Hyde-Smith.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Thank you, Ranking Member Boozman, and 
again, today has been so helpful. It really has. No one is out 
to destroy any company, any industry. The packers are very 
vital in our industry, and we realize that. We just are so 
appreciative of the panel and hopefully may be coming to some 
solutions now that we have had this hearing.
    My third question is for Mr. Tupper again, because we are 
talking about the livestock mandatory reporting. With the 
authorization for the livestock mandatory reporting set to 
expire at the end of this September, what is the case to be 
made for including formula-based pricing in the reporting just 
as current negotiated cash trade, and would this additional 
information be beneficial for producers as they strive for more 
information into the cattle markets, as Senator Fischer has 
alluded to?
    Mr. Tupper. I think it would be more beneficial. I think 
the one thing--and this is going to be real layman's terms--
your confidentiality kills LMR. When we cannot see, because 
there is not--and here is the key--there is not enough 
participants in the market, we cannot report it.
    The trouble with that is, in a fat cattle market today, 
everybody with an iPhone, and you and I know this in the 
marketplace, if somebody is bidding $1.26, which I got texted 
this morning, for fat cattle, everybody in the industry knows 
it. This confidentiality rule that they fall back on, 3/70/20--
thank you, Mr. Tonsor--does not fit for this industry. I 
understand it, and I have been told every time we go to USDA, I 
get shot backwards, because throw up their hands all over 
confidentiality. That is one of the big things. We cannot get 
it all in there.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Thank you. I have a question for Dr. 
Hendrickson. In April and May 2020, you know, we saw the 
grocery stores, just the shelves that were barren, and store 
meat cases. In portions of our country meatpacking plants at a 
standstill due to the COVID, and a backup of fed cattle that 
could not be processed, because the people just were not there 
to be able to process that.
    While larger, more efficient packing plants allow for more 
daily production of meat, can a case be made for directing more 
funding to smaller, independent and regional packing facilities 
to reinforce their role in our supply chains, so we will not 
experience the grocery stores shelves to be completely empty 
like we experienced in that totally unprecedented pandemic?
    Ms. Hendrickson. Thank you, Senator Hyde-Smith. I think 
that building up more forms of capacity in beef packing and 
other parts of the food system is absolutely critical. We do 
not want everything concentrated in one node. We need to have 
multiple nodes and multiple connectivity between nodes in order 
for us to be more resilient and nimble in responding to 
something like the pandemic.
    I think that supporting new kinds of capacity at different 
levels--like right now we do not have anybody between those who 
can process maybe, you know, 80 or 90 cattle a day and people 
that are, you know, doing 5,000 or more a day. That middle is 
missing, and I think that trying to reinforce and build that up 
is really important.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Thank you. For Mark Gardiner, some time 
ago USDA, they consolidated GIPSA under the missionary of the 
USDA Agriculture Marketing Service. Do you, as panelists, 
believe this move has limited the agency's ability to 
investigate any level of the market manipulation in the beef 
industry, and what level of collaboration do you believe there 
should be between USDA and the Department of Justice?
    Mr. Gardiner. Senator, I do not feel I am qualified to 
answer that, so I am not going to conjecture.
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Is there any panelist that would like 
to address that?
    [No response.]
    Senator Hyde-Smith. Okay. It will go unanswered.
    Thank you, Madam Chairman. My time has expired.
    Chairwoman Stabenow.
    [Presiding.] Thank you very much. Thank you to all of our 
witnesses. As you can see, there is no shortage of questions on 
these issues. It is very, very important. We appreciate your 
testimony.
    There is clearly a need for greater transparency and 
competition in the marketplace, and we need to make sure that 
livestock producers of all sizes have options, both in normal 
times and during unprecedented times like we have seen in the 
last 18 months.
    As I said when we started today, we need to keep exploring 
ways to make our livestock supply chain and our food supply 
chain, as a whole, more resilient. Reacting to specific events, 
whether it is a pandemic or a hack or extreme weather is not 
enough. We need to build a food supply chain better able to 
withstand these future disruptions, whatever they are.
    One thing is certain. We are not done as a Committee, and I 
commit to continuing with colleagues, to work with colleagues 
on both sides of the aisle, to address these important issues 
going forward.
    Thank you very much. The hearing is adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 11:26 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

      
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                         QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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