According to a rancher who lives near San Antonio, the Lone Star State’s regulatory apparatus is crushing one of Texas’ most fabled professions: small-scale farming and ranching.
Doug Havemann’s ranch has just 14 cows and around 300 chickens. It pales in comparison to the corporate-owned feedlots and farms of the panhandle, where tens of thousands of cattle and chickens can be raised on a few lots.
Permitting varies by county and even between closely situated cities. However, a typical Texas rancher can have to pay a permit fee to local authorities and obtain a permit from a county health department. That is just to start.
If a rancher does business in another county, he must comply with that jurisdiction’s permitting regime. If he works across multiple counties, he may have to work within numerous jurisdictions’ permitting processes, even though the permits are often substantially similar.
If a rancher has his cattle taken to a processor and then has it brought back onto his ranch, he needs a food manufacturer permit from Texas Health and Human Services.
While most individual permits are not expensive, the combined total costs can eat up a small rancher’s profits. Meanwhile, large cattle producers like Tyson or Cargill can simply absorb the costs because their profit margins are so much bigger, Havemann explained.
This web of regulations came into existence because of concerns about the health and quality of food produced through the industrialized food process that came into being around the turn of the 20th century. At the time, there were numerous instances of Americans, such as soldiers in the Spanish-American War, who were getting killed by tainted meat. Upton Sinclair made the meat industry’s gruesome practices widely known through his 1906 novel The Jungle.
As the family farm became consolidated into a feedlot and meat cutting became centralized and veiled by the walls of a processing plant, regulations grew to control the food production process from the moment a calf or chick is born until it hits the frying pan.
While this process mostly works for controlling disease and other issues for the major food producers, it does not work for the small producers, Havemann said. Moreover, he said it is unnecessary because there are greater social forces acting upon small ranchers.
“We stopped doing [the modern model of ranching] because of the permitting costs, and we developed a client list of direct-to-consumer,” Havemann said. The regulatory burden of this model is far smaller and, therefore, much less expensive.
As a small ranch, he said that any malpractice on his end would be immediately punished, not only through social scorn but also by free market forces. If any of his clients got sick, a single complaint or lawsuit could sink him.
He noted that this is rarely the case for big producers. When there is a recall, consumers rarely know who produced the tainted meat or produce. Moreover, recall notices take so long to go out that Havemann claimed most of the product is already consumed when people find out it is dangerous.
He pointed to situations in Texas like the infamous Blue Bell Ice Cream recall of 2015, where reports revealed Blue Bell knew of the presence of dangerous listeria bacteria in an assembly line for five years before the company announced a recall. Havemann uses this largely forgotten disaster that killed three people as an example of how Texas’ regulatory regime fails to protect public safety while excluding people like him, who are the least likely to endanger their customers.
The Dallas Express contacted Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Texas Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner Cecile Young for comment on whether it is time to reform the permitting process for small farmers. They did not respond by the time of publication.