Which State Is the Leader of Beef Production

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"Yuck."

That was my response later on reading Consumer Reports' recent ground-beef production safety test. The non-profit company went cerise-meat crazy by purchasing 300 packages of beef from supermarkets, large-box stores, and organic food retailers across the country. They and then tested the meat for all manner of unhealthy bacteria.

The results weren't appetizing. Tests showed a basic level of fecal contagion, the kind that can crusade blood or urinary tract infections, in 100% (!) of the basis beef. Furthermore, twenty% of the meat tested positive for a bacteria that causes a 1000000 cases of food poisoning each twelvemonth. And about one% contained salmonella, the microorganism behind nineteen,000 hospitalizations and 380 deaths in the U.S. per yr.

Consumer Reports recommended that meat fans cook ground beef thoroughly and try to buy sustainably raised beefiness wherever possible, since information technology has a lower prevalence of these dangerous bacteria. They also highlighted a major structural risk of the meat industry, that information technology's dominated by just four producers accounting for over 80% of all beef processing in this state.

Those leading cattle-slaughtering companies are:

1. Tyson Foods (TSN -1.57%), the nation's largest beef producer. Tyson facilities can process up to 175,000 cattle per calendar week. The company booked $16 billion of beefiness sales last year alone.
2. Cargill. With 153,000 employees and $120 billion of annual sales, Cargill is one of the largest privately held companies in the globe. Subsidiary Cargill Beef processes 8 million cattle and 8 billion pounds of boxed beefiness per year through its viii plants in the U.South. and Canada.
3. JBS United states is a subsidiary of Brazil-based JBS S.A., which is the largest beef packer in the world. JBS USA operates nine cattle processing plants across the Midwest.
4. National Beefiness is the fourth-largest cattle processor, with marketplace share of 13%. Subsequently a failed conquering attempt by JBS S.A. in 2009, National Beefiness is at present a subsidiary of holding company Leucadia National (JEF 0.21%).

Why information technology matters
The controversy over such a large concentration of beef production centers around pricing and condom worries. Since massive processing companies carry and so much weight in the market for cattle, they can drive prices down for ranchers and feedlots, pain their businesses in the process.

And higher up on the value chain, the lack of competition at the grocery-store level tin can push button prices up for consumers. That'southward why the U.S. Justice Section challenged the proposed purchase of National Beefiness by JBS S.A., saying "contest in the auction of boxed beef to grocers, food service companies and ultimately American consumers" was at risk.

But the bigger business organization is over food rubber, as Consumer Reports only highlighted. Since so much supply is being handled by and so few companies, the potential for regional or fifty-fifty national outbreaks is enhanced. Albert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Establish, recently told The Wall Street Periodical that mergers are adding fragility to the nutrient supply chain. "As you become more than and more consolidated, with fewer and fewer redundancies, the opportunities for catastrophic breakdowns expand," he said. And that's true no affair how important nutrient prophylactic standards are to these four beef giants.

What you can practice almost it
Cherry-red-meat fans take a few options available to them if they desire to reduce the chance associated with eating beefiness. You can ask for well-done burgers at restaurants and buy more sustainably raised beefiness during your next grocery shopping trip. You tin also shift consumption away from ground beef and toward whole cuts like steaks and roasts. Since bacteria tend to exist just the surface of these cuts, as opposed to throughout mixed ground beef products, the cooking process is more likely to remove all of them.

But the trend of increasing concentration of beefiness processing isn't likely to reverse. Simply as in any manufacture, scale efficiencies give the big players major advantages over smaller rivals. And the leaders will always seek to maximize those benefits past growing bigger nevertheless.

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Source: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/09/17/yup-80-of-our-beef-comes-from-4-producers.aspx

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