SH, in your mind, no one has ever contradicted anything you have said.
You tell us the effects of concentration all the time...small and medium processors are forced out of business because they can't compete with the economics of scale. When my processor decides to give it up(as he almost did after the Greeley recall), I'm out of business along with everyone else that processes product for resale...just as other producers are effected with each plant closing. That is a marketing avenue taken away because of concentration. It is this uncertainty that keeps me from pushing this business to expand to the point I can make a good living income from it. The market is there, but without a processor, I have no way to access that market. And there isn't another USDA processor that will process for a small producers for several hundred miles. If the majority of producers maintain your attitude, which they do, the day will come that a producer will have to have a signed contract(with stipulated protocol) with a processor to be in business. Don't believe me...look at the chicken industry, there is NO FREE INDEPENDENT MARKET! You, like most all other producers, will keep your head up the big packer's butt until it is too late. And then we will all be in the same shape as Canadian producers...we will have to take what we are offered because we will have no other options. If producers have any desire to control their own destiny, they had better wake up because the present course of the industry will eliminate any ability for control.