I’m Outside of Tyson in Dakota City…There’s Opportunity to Fix our Food and Ag Systems

Hey there,

Coming to you from my car just outside of the Tyson meatpacking plant here in Dakota City, Nebraska, which is right across the river from Sioux City.

They’ve had a lot of COVID-19 cases from the workers in here and just a few days ago, the CEO of Tyson said that our food supply is breaking.

The truth is that it’s been broken for a while. The one thing that I hope this crisis does is shine a spotlight on what’s happening in our food systems.

Decades of prioritizing efficiency and corporate profits over the resilience and fairness has made our food system unfair and unsustainable and unstable. We see this play out from policies of “get big or get off the farm,” corporate consolidation, and the rise of Dollar Generals undercutting our independent small grocers. We see that all throughout the 4th district.

I’m hopeful that in this crisis there’s opportunity. And the opportunity is that we appreciate our workers like the folks who are laying it out down here and appreciate our farmers who have been squeezed on the input side and on the market side for a long time now so you see a part of the issue is in just beef 50 plants produce 98% of our beef. That is so concentrated that there is not
much flexibility or adaptability and I think there’s over 79 right now meatpacking plants that have workers with COVID-19. There’s not a lot of flexibility of what’s happening right now so the first step in a lot of this is what you hear me talk about all the time is enforcing our antitrust laws.

That’s gotta be one of the first things we do when we come out of this so we have more regional and localized food systems. For just pennies on the dollar, we can invest in a food system that’s more efficient, for instance 60% of our apple juice comes from China.

And yet, in the 4th district, we have plenty of apple orchards and you see that all across the nation. I’m hopeful that out of this comes opportunity and that opportunity to reset and prioritize what we value in our food system. Things aren’t going to happen overnight, but it’s important that we realize what the issues are and we can create a new reality in the food and ag systems. With that, I just wanted to say thank you.