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Welcome to the Cow Industrial Complex: The link between your health, the stock market and corporate personhood

(Presented Monday, April 30, 2007, at Farm & Food Network Meeting, Albany, NY, by Billie Best, includes excerpt from forthcoming book. CLICK HERE for a printable PDF copy.)

I had to read a book about sheep to get a clear picture of the Cow Industrial Complex. Mad Sheep: the True Story Behind the USDA’s War on a Family Farm (published by Chelsea Green in 2006), written by Vermont shepherd Linda Faillace, tells her family’s heartbreaking tale of government abuse as it elucidates just how embedded the cattle business is in the U.S. economy. When Linda and her husband, Larry, a PhD in animal science, tried to start a sheep farm in Vermont by importing the most productive sheep breeds from Europe, they found themselves embroiled in the controversy over Mad Cow Disease (also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE)—even though sheep don’t get BSE. There is a similar disease in sheep and goats known as scrapie. The sheep imported by the Faillace family were certified by multiple European and USDA authorities as scrapie free.

Still the USDA, under pressure from a secret enemy of the sheep business, claimed the Faillace sheep had BSE and exterminated their flock to protect Americans from getting Mad Cow Disease—a flock of perfectly healthy, genetically superior, high-priced breeding stock that presented an opportunity to develop a competitive sheep industry in the United States; one that could compete with cattle on the land, in the marketplace and in the minds of consumers looking for a safer, cleaner, more earth-friendly food supply. The Faillace family’s story brings to light the power of the cow lobby in Washington, D.C., how vulnerable we actually are to Mad Cow Disease, how many sectors of the U.S. economy depend upon the inputs and outputs of the cattle business, and just how few checks and balances are in place to ensure the USDA does not abuse its power to destroy farms.

My husband and I have a vested interest in the cattle business. Almost two years ago, we purchased a pregnant cow and her year-old weanling from a local grass farmer. Ruby was a three-year-old Red Angus. She was bred to a Devon twice, to produce her weanling and her unborn calf. We would like to raise Devons, the auburn-haired cattle breed that came to this continent from England on the Mayflower. They’re hardy animals, well suited to a diet of 100% grass, and able to live in the elements all year round. You can look at Ruby and see she is top quality meat, an excellent basis for grass genetics. We plan to breed her daughters with the best Devon bulls we can find to eventually have a purebred Devon herd.

We didn’t intend to name the weanling. For a few weeks we just called her 64A. That got reduced to Ayla. We purchased movable electric fence and rotated Ruby and Ayla across a few acres of pasture. We had taken workshops with the best grass farmers in the country. We have a few local grass farmers who mentor us, and we read the trades. A stack of books on grass farming sits on the coffee table. But the day before Ruby was due to calve, I was in a hurry. My brain cramped and I decided to move the cows from one paddock to another, even though there was a big gap in the fence connecting the paddocks. Hungry cows are going to go where the grass is greener, right?

Ruby came through the gate with Ayla right behind. She saw the opening in the fence, got a wild look in her eye, and took off right through the gap into the woods, with Ayla in tow. I would have never believed a cow loaded down with that much calf could run that fast, over rocky ledge and fallen trees, through under brush and hedgerows. I raced to keep up with her, trying to head her off and turn her toward home, but she was determined to go deeper and deeper into the woods. At one point we crossed a lane between fields and I could see Chet in the distance on the tractor. I waved frantically. He looked puzzled. Then he saw the cows and his face froze. He got a rope and a bucket of chicken feed and caught up with us in the car.

Cows that live on 100% grass don’t think of grain as dessert. Ruby was not enticed by the chicken mash or the whole corn. It took two of us two hours of pure fear to chase those cows out of the woods and back into the main paddock. My clothes were torn, my face and arms and legs were all scratched up, my heart was pounding and my husband was angry. I collapsed on the couch and read the chapter about how cows get sneaky, take off and try to hide when they’re about to calf. Ruby birthed Lisa the next morning.

I wish I could say that was the only cow mistake we’ve made. We bought weed hay in September at $2.00 a bale, and second cutting in October at $2.75 a bale—delivered and loaded into our barn. Our goats loved the weed hay, and it makes good bedding, but the cows will have none of it. I guess we’ve spoiled them.

We knew we did not have enough hay to make it through winter, but still I passed up a chance to buy what we needed at $3.50 a bale, delivered, because I thought it was too expensive. In January we bought another hundred bales at $2.75, but we had to go get them, load them onto a trailer and load them into the barn. Hay shopping in February is embarrassing. Hay farmers know they have a newbie or a rich fool on the line. The price goes up by the week. Now we were talking about paying between $3.50 and $4.50 a bale for horse hay, and we would still have to go get it and load it ourselves. For that price we could have fenced a new pasture.

If we had a spare cow, we would have had freezer beef instead of buying more hay. But we can’t grow our herd if we eat them. We don’t blame our neighbors. Farmers grow hay for the customers they have, not for the customers who weren’t smart enough to get their order in during hay season. It’s a hard thing to look out the window and realize you feed your animals or they die. You let them get too hungry and they do every thing they can to escape your care. It was a long snowy winter. For the last month of it I went from farm to farm and begged my way into twenty bales at a time.

Customer relations are a critical part of any business. One of the last corporate consulting gigs I did overlapped my study of farming, and I was surprised how much my belief in community food systems influenced my thinking about big business. The project was for a very large software company that was frustrated by their customers’ lack of loyalty. They were spending millions of dollars a year on advertising, and their website was getting millions of hits a month, but they weren’t seeing the repeat business they wanted from the people who bought their products. They didn’t actually know any of those people personally, but they wanted them to be loyal just the same.

Our team of consultants pitched them on the principles of relationship marketing and I realized that we were really teaching them how to transform themselves from commodity to community. They had the same problem that a lot of commodity dairy farmers complain about: the market is over supplied, the product has become both generic and ubiquitous, and the distributors and retailers, who actually have the face-to-face relationships with the customers, are squeezing producers. Relationship marketing is a technique for moving markets to become communities by creating experiences that make people feel good. When was the last time you felt good buying milk?

Communities come into existence when they serve the common good of community members. They are the result of grassroots self-organizing. They evolve organically from the bottom up. They can be envisioned and enabled from the top down, but they cannot be created by executive fiat. That’s where our whole business pitch collapsed. We wanted them to create deeper relationships with their employees and their customers as a way of building their business. That meant investing in getting to know people and gaining their trust. But most corporate executives want to get things done by handing down marching orders, not getting friendly with their employees. That’s how commodities get created in the first place.

Commodities are the antithesis of community. Where communities continuously balance the needs of individuals and the whole, commodities tend to favor the needs of the whole at the expense of individuals. Products don’t become commodities until a vast labyrinth of infrastructure components is in place. When it begins to creak with age, the big guys squeeze the little guys to get every last drop of value from the system they’ve created.

Our species has done a fine job of creating commodities. We have proven that anything we make can be commoditized: milk, meat, corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar, steel, cement, timber, textiles, clothes, computers, consumer electronics, cars, software, music, movies, magazines, people. Once a product becomes commoditized the only way to make money is on the margins, by doing volume business with volume players. When clusters of products become commodities a whole industry can get squeezed. That’s why automotive, once a flagship industry of the American economy, is moving offshore where the component commodities cost less.

The Cow Industrial Complex, like automotive, is a deeply integrated cluster of industries so interdependent upon each other for a cheap supply line that their relationship could be described in an economic Domino Theory. Knock one of them down and each of them in succession could fall.

Hundreds of different products in dozens of different industries are made from cow parts. They all depend on a system of cheap cow manufacturing. Since I love cows, it breaks my heart to see what we’ve done to this creature that enabled the evolution of human civilization. On the other hand, I’m pretty fond of human civilization, so I think it’s important to look for gentle, incremental ways to dismantle the Cow Industrial Complex, which includes:

The manufacturers of the fertilizer and seed for cattle feed crops, mainly corn and soybeans, 70% of which are grown to feed livestock; millions of acres of government subsidized farms growing corn and soybeans; manufacturers of all of the heavy machinery and equipment required to plant and harvest millions of acres of row crops, and bring them to market; the animal factories that depend upon cheap feed from subsidized farms, and cheap antibiotics from pharmaceutical companies to speed the growth and slow the death of livestock in confined animal feeding operations; the pharmaceutical companies that sell 70% of their antibiotics to the livestock industry, making them increasingly useless for treating human and animal health; the dairy industry that makes cheap milk, cream, butter and cheese the most profitable foods for supermarkets to sell; the processed food manufacturers that depend upon cheap corn syrup and soy to make cheap food for people and animals; the slaughterhouses that process a thousand cows an hour and the meat processing facilities that fit meat from one hundred cows into one hamburger; the rendering plants that supply the manufacturers of the 650 different products, health and beauty aids, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and medical supplies made from cow parts; the millions of restaurants, convenience stores and supermarkets whose most popular product is hamburger and most popular beverages contain corn syrup; a government bureaucracy with thousands of employees dedicated to preserving the status quo of cheap, abundant American corn, soy, beef and milk; the investors, stock market traders, brokers and analysts, economists and consultants, insurance companies and banks who live off the system’s financial transactions; and thousands of non-government organizations, trade associations, industry analysts, scientists, research organizations, lawyers, lobbyists and legislators who feed themselves by protecting the interests of the Cow Industrial Complex.

What we want is simple: earth-friendly agriculture, humane treatment of animals, a healthy, nutritious food supply, and antibiotics that work. The roadblock is billions of dollars invested in a system that prevents those things. It began with the U.S. government’s subsidies of commodity crops, and it continues with something called corporate personhood. Pick any point in the process to dissemble the Cow Industrial Complex and you will run into a wall of money, and corporations claiming they have the same civil rights as people.

But corporations are not people. They do not have a mother or a father, and they do not die. They do not have a species, a race or a gender. They do not enjoy life, liberty or happiness. They do not have a conscience, emotions or intellect. They do not eat, sing or dance. They are not sentient beings. They do not love. They do not have children. They don’t get stuck in traffic jams. They do not use a cane, wear glasses or sit in wheelchairs. They cannot read Braille. They do not have diabetes. They cannot be sent to jail, hit by a bus or starved to death. They do not need food, shelter, education or healthcare. They don’t need a ride to work. They are invisible. They do not show up to vote at the polls. They do not shake hands or kiss babies. They are not alive. They are simply organized money.

Should money have the same rights as people?

Corporations are a way for us to do business. They exist on paper as a way of identifying an enterprise separately from the people who operate it, enabling them to pool their money to fund it, and share the resulting profits or losses. Corporations are a reflection of the people who own and operate them, but corporations are not people.

Today, our courts have interpreted the law to mean that corporations have the same civil rights as people, and they can compete with people for the government’s attention. Since they aren’t human, they replace our right to vote with the money they contribute to politicians and political campaigns. But if people have the right to vote, and corporations have the right to vote, then some people are getting to vote twice, once as a citizen and again as an owner of a corporation. Our law says “one man, one vote,” but when money votes the actuality becomes “big money, big influence.”

When money votes our government serves the interests of corporations rather than people, the process of government is perverted by greed, government officials are corrupted, and the law becomes a tool for creating wealth for the few at the expense of everybody else. Citizens should not have to compete with corporate money to influence government. Our government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people. Corporations are not people.

Government cozies up to business in the name of economic growth. But when corporations compete with each other for government favor, there is always a winner and a loser. One business grows, another doesn’t. When the government spends our tax dollars to subsidize big fossil fuel companies, renewable energy products appear to be more expensive than they truly are. When the government provides tax advantages to pharmaceutical companies, it puts alternative medicine at a disadvantage. When government props up the price of commodities, it tilts the playing field against small independent producers. When government bails out industry giants, bloated inefficient business models are put on life support while entrepreneurships have to fend for themselves. Each time it tinkers with industry specific regulations government creates as many problems as it solves.

Today, big money is deeply embedded in government because our society sees economic growth as a universal panacea. Our corporations have become increasingly dependent upon government favors for competitive advantages and opportunities for growth. At the same time, government has become increasingly dependent upon the financial contributions of corporations to fund growth in its operations.

Big business feeds big government. The government’s addiction to the financial contributions of corporations leads it to promote limitless economic growth at the expense of the environment and social justice. But limitless growth is not possible on a finite planet with limited natural resources and a growing human population.

Our “growth” economic model is a pyramid scheme. The first players to join the game had seemingly limitless opportunity. Each successive wave of economic players has had fewer opportunities because there are fewer and fewer natural resources available. Thus these players have been forced into an increasingly fierce competition. The scarcity of resources is what turns corporations into predators, and competition has never been so vicious. Millions of humans are being sacrificed in this race to the bottom so a few of us can live lives of luxury, pay lower prices, generate garbage and hoard resources.

As long as we see the main work of government as creating wealth by growing the economy, our government will have a distorted purpose, because there are other kinds of wealth. Our species depends upon the wealth of natural resources, air, water and soil. The earth’s natural environment is what sustains our life form. Shouldn’t the government be growing our environmental wealth? We cannot survive without the social capital of family, culture and community that nurtures us from cradle to grave. Shouldn’t the government be growing our social wealth? If government took a whole systems approach to providing for our common good, wouldn’t it value environmental and social capital equal to money?

We can’t eat money for breakfast. We can’t breathe it or talk to it. Money does not hug us when we cry or pick us up when we fall. In fact money doesn’t really exist except in our imaginations where we believe little pieces of paper and lumps of metal entitle us to buy stuff. Money represents our values. It is a way to store the value we accumulate and account for it. Money can be gold or silver, carved beads or salt. It is just a tracking system for what we owe and what others owe us. The proof that money is a belief system is in the fact that if we lose faith in our money, it becomes worthless.

When we lose faith in the value of our money there is usually a run on the bank. We want to put our hands on the actual physical cash instead of simply seeing our wealth itemized on our bank statement. When they get to the bank, most people find they can’t get their cash out because it was never in there in the first place. Money, as they say, only exists on paper. Without cash to pay for things, people start swapping stuff. They trade valuables like goats, silk, bear skins, firewood, chickens, rice, sugar or flour. Our ideas about money today are more complex because our business deals are more complex. But money is just a means of exchange.

Wisely, the Founders of the United States of America thought it was important for the government to distinguish between the permanent essentials of human life and liberty for all people, and transient beliefs like culture and religion that come and go with time and temperament. Our species requires a hospitable environment and social network to survive the elements, find food and shelter. Our economy is an artifact of that human existence. It is an expression of our values. Wealth is not warmth and money does not grow food. Would the Founders of our nation have condoned giving the vote to transient, invisible, invented money?

In turbulent times, we need stability. We need a government that balances the values of people, planet and profits. Imagine a world where corporations have to deliver social and environmental benefits to renew their charter. A world where corporations could not go on forever regardless of their infringement on the public good, their violation of the law, or their violation of the public trust; a world where corporations could be brought to an end for criminal activity; a world where corporations had no role in government elections.

Corporations would have little incentive to try to manipulate government to their advantage if government was prohibited from treating businesses unequally. If all businesses were treated in the same way, many government resources currently devoted to exercising the will of business, developing and enforcing industry regulations, managing trade and manipulating the economy would have to find other means to justify their existence. More government resources could be devoted to conserving our environment, protecting commonly held resources, restoring our ravaged planet and ensuring social welfare.

What does it mean to treat all businesses equally? For example, to eliminate pollution, instead of regulating individual industries or production processes, we might simply say our goal is zero pollution and all polluters will be given X amount of time to phase out all pollution. To eliminate our trash problem, instead of regulating a particular product, substance, process or place, we might adopt a policy of 100% recycling and require all manufacturers to provide for the recycling of all their products. To have a healthier food supply and keep antibiotics working, we might phase out 100% of antibiotics in our food. To address the water crisis we might claim access to potable water as a human right and restrict all commercial use of water.

Our modern industrial complexes signify the deep interconnectedness of our industries and markets, and our infinite ability to innovate for market advantage. We have a Military Industrial Complex, a Healthcare Industrial Complex, an Education Industrial Complex, a Cow Industrial Complex, and many more. Tinkering with the individual regulations that impact vast complex systems simply moves around the pieces of the problem. We need all businesses and industries to change the outcomes of their actions. We need to regulate outcomes, not industries.

Separation of business and state, modeled on separation of religion and state, addresses four important issues. First, corporations are not people and are not entitled to the rights of people. Second, the work of government is to balance the interests of society, the environment and the economy, not the interests of one at the expense of the other two. Third, government is corrupted when business interests fund government operations. And fourth, government meddling in business creates unfair advantages for some and unintended consequences for all.

We need to get real about the future, give priority to people over profits, and acknowledge that people cannot lead healthy lives without a healthy planet. We need to establish our government’s highest priority as stewarding our shared resources and building our shared wealth. When we separate business and state, we honor freedom and diversity. We affirm our belief in free markets as the expression of a free society, and not the reverse. And we affirm the Founding Fathers’ intention that in a free society only people have the right to vote, each person gets only one vote, and the people are the highest authority in the land.