America’s sheep farmers faced a major battle in July 2020 — and it wasn’t the pandemic.
In Greeley, Colorado, the second largest lamb processing facility in the nation, Mountain States Rosen, was up for auction. Greeley FAB LLC, a Mountain States subsidiary, was set to win the bankruptcy auction with a bid of $10 million and retain the plant and its 222 employees.
That is until Brazilian-based food industry corporation, JBS, placed a winning bid of $14.25 million.
Shortly after acquisition, JBS announced the plant would shift to beef processing only, shutting down all lamb processing. With more than one-fifth of the nation’s sheep ranchers using the plant, this change would leave hundreds of thousands of lambs stranded in feedlots or ranges.
Foreseeing the drastic implications of JBS’s acquisition of the plant, Utah GOP Chairperson Carson Jorgensen took action to advocate for an anti-trust investigation. A sixth-generation sheep rancher himself, he and his family manage 5,000 ewes on more than 200,000 acres near Mount Pleasant, Utah.
Carson Jorgensen speaks to delegates at the Weber County Republican Party convention.
Jorgensen wrote letters to Vice President Mike Pence, congressional members, Utah Governor Gary Herbert. His efforts eventually caught the attention of Utah Senator Mike Lee. Lee wrote a letter to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, which prompted an investigation into the acquisition.
But the investigation closed in 30 days, with the ruling in favor of JBS. All sheep ranchers sending animals to Mountain States Rosen were forced to find new processing plants over the following months.
“Most of them had to send their lambs to be processed at the Colorado Lamb Processors plant in Brush, or the Double J Lamb plant in San Angelo, Texas,” Jorgensen says. “It is widely believed that JBS did this to take the market share and fill it with imports.”
American sheep ranchers have begrudgingly dealt with the monopolization and centralization of sheep processing facilities for years. Moreover, some of the same companies that own these processing giants — such as JBS — also own the companies that import lamb and mutton from countries like New Zealand and Australia.
“When one or two of these companies own all of the packing plants, the more beholden we are to everything they say,” Jorgensen says. “The more we can decentralize that power, the better off we’ll be.”
Though consumer demand for lamb remains high in the U.S., 70% of the lamb and mutton consumed here is imported. In tune with this trend is the downsizing of the domestic sheep herd. There were over 55 million head in the 1950s; today, there is less than 5 million.
Jorgensen explains imports did slow during the pandemic, which allowed for record prices in 2020. “We saw lamb selling for more than it ever did, sometimes up to three bucks a pound. But now, we can’t get our product into the stores,” he says.
Prices have dropped significantly once ports re-opened, causing supply to flood the market. Like his grandfather, who testified to Congress in the 1980s to add tariffs to imports, Jorgensen is taking an active political role in his home state of Utah to protect American sheep farmers today.
He has spoken on podcasts and television shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, and at the Conservative Climate Summit, debating issues like the harmful effects of Environmental, Social & Corporate Governance (ESG) and agriculture’s effects on climate change.
“Many of us in agriculture are so worried about paying our bills, we don’t often have the bandwidth to be involved in politics,” he says. “But we need to be reminded that we in agriculture wield the hammer.”
The Jorgensen family.
Learn more about Jorgensen and his campaign at www.carsonjorgensen.com.