For Immediate Release:
February 10, 2015
Nebraska Senator Opens Door to Chinese Meat Racket
Senator Ken Schilz is introducing two bills before the Nebraska Ag Committee this week that could turn the State of Nebraska into a massive industrial Chinese hog factory. Working hand- in-hand with Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork company in the world, Senator Schilz is facilitating the Chinese government’s five-year-plan to feed China while greatly reducing our own food security. The legislation opens the door to the foreign extraction of Nebraska’s most valuable resources, its fertile soils and precious water, turning the state into a polluted Appalachia of factory farming.
The two bills, LB176 and LB175, open Nebraska up to an abusive model of factory farm production known throughout agriculture as “chickenization” for the way it corporatized the poultry industry. In his book The Meat Racket, author Chris Leonard details how this phenomenon transpired as the Tyson family rose to prominence in the poultry industry. It describes how Tyson built an empire on the backs of contract poultry growers at the expense of rural communities and the environment.
LB176 allows hog processors to own hogs as long as they are have a contract with producers. LB175 undermines local planning and zoning authority, forcing counties to accept mega- livestock operations.
The bills work in tandem to reverse laws that long protected Nebraska’s family farmers from the abuses of corporate farming. Senator Schilz’s bills will force once independent family farmers, having lost their fair, open and competitive markets, into one-sided contract growing arrangements with the world’s biggest food corporations. Like chicken farmers before them, Nebraska’s family farmers will become captive serfs on their own land, while the poultry integrators take everything but the debt and the manure.
The Organization for Competitive Markets has fought for the past sixteen years for fair, open and competitive markets. We ask the Nebraska legislature to support markets for farmers, not sentence them to serfdom. We ask Senator Schilz and the Nebraska legislature to protect the state’s resources and represent the people of Nebraska, not cave in to big corporate money and foreign interests. Please kill The Meat Racket bills, LB176 and LB175!
Who in the hell elected him?????
In all honesty, this guy is in way over his head. The meat industry does a real good job of pulling legislator’s ears and greasing the tracks the party and possibly this legislator specifically with strategic donations. The industry has lobbyists working on their plans continually. Without a good countervailing argument, he probably isn’t smart enough to even know what the consequences are.
We have to remember that this situation developed when Senator Debbie Stabenow (D) took over the Agriculture Committee in the Senate failed to follow up on the Office of Inspector General’s reports on the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyard’s Administration’s failures. Stabebow failed to do her part in oversight of the federal agency and instead followed the Pork Industry lobby into doing NOTHING.
It just proves that incompetence and corruption are a large part of both the Republican and Democrat leadership in Congress.
After protecting these giant corporate industries when they obviously violated the Packers and Stockyards Act, Stabenow became an accomplice in the shareholders of Smithfield’s lobbying efforts to not be held accountable for breaking the law mean to protect farmers from market abuse. The shareholders then capitalized on their profound luck in stifling adequate oversight by Congress into selling themselves to Chinese corporate interests.
Senator Debbie Stabenow is as guilty for selling family farmers to Chinese corporate interests as this “bold” move by Senator Schilz is what we reap as citizens when we don’t hold our elected leaders for their aversion to rule of gold over the rule of law. We quite simply have the best politicians money can buy.
It will bankrupt the nation.
So … I wonder what the Schilz Subsidies will be under the new Chinese regime?
Senator Schilz & Family’s Government Subsidies
Schilz Farms; Brule (Keith County), Neb.; 2006 – 2012 – ewg.
Ownership: Dennis, Kenneth and Stephen Schilz.
Conservation Subsidies:………………………………$61,483
Commodity Subsidies:………………………………..$674,314 – grain.
Total Subsidies:…………………………………………$735,797
L&W Inc.; Keith County, Neb.; 1995 – 2007 – ewg.
Ownership: Patricia Adams; Allison and Heather Locke; Bill and Wilma Schilz.
Commodity Subsidies:………………………………..$128,371 – grain.
McGinley Schilz Co.; Keith County, Neb.; 1995 – 2008 – ewg.
Ownership: Patricia Adams; Allison, Heather and Jack Locke; Bill, Dennis, Kenneth, Kristene, Rexene, Stephen Schilz.
Conservation Subsidies:……………………………..$105,976
Disaster Subsidies:……………………………………$1,360
Commodity Subsidies:………………………………..$1,057,997 – grain.
Total Subsidies:……………………………………….$1,165,333
Red Willow Cattle Co.; Keith County, Neb.; 1995 – 2006 – ewg.
Ownership: Kenneth, Kristene, Stephen Schilz; Dennis Schilz Irrevocable Trust.
Conservation Subsidies:……………………………..$42,909
Disaster Subsidies:……………………………………$3,375
Commodity Subsidies:………………………………..$936,172 – mostly grain.
Total Subsidies:……………………………………….$982,456
Schilz, Dennis, Irrevocable Trust; Keith County, Neb.
Ownership: Red Willow Cattle Co.
No subsidies. – ewg.
Source: Environmental Working Group
The total for above subsidies is $3,611,957 – gives me the Schilz!
If your concerned about Senator Shilz and his Chinese “Chickenization” Program let him know:
Senator Shilz, District 47, Room #1210, P.O. Box 94604, Lincoln, NE 68509
Phone: (402) 471-2616 / Email: [email protected]
Wow, how about we ask Shilz to put his acreage in the government’s name with all the taxpayer subsidies he has been given the taxpayers must own a part of it.
Welfare queens like Shilz have no business making government policy for everyone else while he has such large logs in his eye. Maybe being paid off has been so “ingrained” in his persona that he has no problem selling out every other family farmer.
It is time voters called him back.
Isnt this also trying to happen out in western kansas? Terrible
Yes, corporate hogs have built facilities recently around Sharon Springs. Previously they had to convince a few commissioners to locate in counties where even if the citizens were allowed a vote, they lacked truthful information on the effects of the operation on the local economy and environment. The Schilz bills would eliminate local control, the counties won’t get a vote at all. As citizens become better informed, industrial ag, Chinese or otherwise, will have a much harder time expanding. Senator Schilz wants to remove barriers and reduce or eliminate citizen choice and power.
All our Midwest state legislatures are under siege by these giant corporate entities buying legislators to do their bidding.
In Missouri, the legislature was bought to the point that, in late 2013, a last minute change to a bill eliminating “construction” permits for CAFOs opened the door to major manipulation of the statutes regarding the permitting of these giant factory farms. Missouri now is allowing shell companies with no assets – no land, no barns, no equipment, and no financial ability- to put these operations on minimal property (the one currently under appeal is-20 acres) under easement contracts to others. The millions of gallons of liquid manure is then transferred to others, and spread on other properties under other easement contracts or spreading agreements without attention to erodable land, setbacks from residences schools, churches, or streams and no controls on run off. The protection of the waters of the state and the US has just been wiped out, and Missouri is the next state to become a cesspool of toxic manure in its streams and rivers.
Farmers and residents of the state who oppose these facilities and are damaged by these operations are being deliberately targeted for take over of their lands and property and are being driven out of their homes and off their farms, in addition to having markets for their products closed to them.