The Longest Rap Sheet in the Meat Business (Inside JBS, the Biggest of the Big 4 Meatpackers)

This week JBS announced they're closing their beef processing plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania.

JBS is one of the Big 4. The four companies that, between them, control 85% of the beef in this country.

And they aren't just one of them. They are, for my money, the worst one.

Not only are they the biggest, they have a unique disregard for pesky things like laws, and have earned one of the most colorful rap sheets in the meat biz….

The JBS rap sheet

• Pleaded guilty to bribery. JBS admitted to roughly $150 million in bribes to over 1,800 Brazilian officials, and paid more than $256 million to settle.
• Settled beef price-fixing lawsuits. Accused of conspiring with the other Big 4 packers to choke cattle supply and prices, JBS paid out $52.5M, $25M, and $83M in separate settlements.
• Caught with kids in the plants. Federal investigators found 100+ children, some as young as 13, cleaning skull splitters and bone saws with corrosive chemicals overnight in meatpacking plants. JBS agreed to put up $4 million to address it.
• Lied about "Antibiotic-Free" claims. In 2024 the USDA found JBS using human-grade antibiotics in beef sold as antibiotic-free.
• Illegally cleared the Amazon rainforest. JBS was hit with a $64 million fine in Brazil for cattle raised on illegally cleared rainforest that cut 800 million-plus trees in six years.

Like I said…. 'colorful' folks.

Also kinda weird how small those fines are compared to the crazy sh*t they were up to. Kinda makes you wonder?

(In a moment of weakness I once wrote an apology to Big Food, Pharma, and Ag. Sort of.)

Anyway.

The plant is closing by August. That means 1,700 jobs gone in under 2 months. Real people, here in the Northeast, doing a hard and thankless job, turned out on the street.

The reason this is happening is worth noodling on.

Why JBS is losing $279 million in a single quarter

JBS lost $279 million on its North American beef operations in a single quarter. Not because people magically stopped wanting beef, but because the very industrial model they built is absolutely eating itself:

• They spent years colluding with the rest of the Big 4 to keep the prices they paid ranchers down
• That hurt farmers and shoved the whole industry toward bigger, faster, cheaper: feedlots, massive chemical-first cropping operations, confinement, squeezing every last pound out of every animal
• Those practices degraded the soil, drove family farms out of business, and hollowed out rural towns
• And now there just aren't enough cows, so cattle prices are up
• Given the chance to finally turn a profit after decades of getting squeezed, farmers and ranchers are selling every animal they possibly can while prices are high.
• Which means the cattle supply keeps shrinking. Prices keep rising. And the Big 4 keep cutting every possible corner to eke every last cent out of those prices (hello 'wet-aging' and soggy beef).

Now the only move left is to cut 1,700 jobs in a 150-year-old plant for eVeN mOre eFfiCieNcY!

You can make your own assumptions about how that will pan out....

(For more on how this all shows up at the grocery store, here's why grocery store beef is watery and who's profiting from it.)

What this means for the rest of us

But in our view, when you build a system where four companies and a couple dozen mega-plants control everything, this is the inevitable endgame. One press release drops and an entire town is devastated.

This isn't even the first industrial plant to close this year, for the crime of not being quite "Mega" or "Modern" enough.

The thing they sold us as cheap and reliable is clearly turning out to be neither. It's a broken system, and we seem to be nearing the finale of their race to the bottom.

The whole situation makes me sick.

Fixing the broader beef industry is a big job. I don't pretend to have all the answers.

Not every farmer or rancher is set up to do what we do. Not everyone should have to finish cows all the way out and handle butchering logistics and pack and ship the beef.

On a macro scale there is some value to larger meatpackers and everything is not quite as simple as other farmers just doing what we're doing.

(For the structural backdrop on what's killing the family farms that fed the rest of the supply chain, here's why American farms are disappearing at 77 per day.)

Get off the sinking ship

But for you? For your family? The answer is clear.

GET OFF THE SINKING SHIP.

You don't have to fix the whole broken system to walk away from it.

A beef share is the off-ramp. You buy a year of the most delicious beef you've ever had straight from a farm with nothing to hide, from cattle you can drive right by, butchered by a small team of people we know by name. No multinational Amazon-rainforest-clearing corporation. No bribery slush fund. No mystery antibiotics. All supporting a healthy local economy (and even healthier soils).

You can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

P.S. We are currently hiring a Full Time Farm Hand to work with our team on everything from order packing to cattle moves to haymaking. If you are interested in working here just reply and I'll get you the job description!