The rate of food price increases is expected to slow in the remainder of the 2024 through 2025 after several turbulent years that have left some wondering if consumers have been gouged.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) latest Consumer Price Index report predicts all food costs will rise by 2.3 percent this year. Those costs are expected to rise by 2 percent next year. However, food-at-home prices (think grocery store prices) are expected to only rise by 1.2 percent while food-away-from home prices (think restaurants) are expect to rise 4.1 percent.
Food prices surged in the onset of the Covid pandemic, raising all food prices by a bit more than 3 percent in 2020. This increased to nearly 4 percent in 2021.
But food prices leapt up by nearly 10 percent in 2022, the highest increase in food prices since 1979, according to the USDA. Some of this can be explained by a bird flu outbreak that affected egg and poultry prices, and the war in Ukraine, which the feds say compounded other economy-wide inflationary pressures like high energy costs. This trend slowed last year, with food prices rising by nearly 6 percent.
So, prices have gone up. But is it price gouging? That’s what the USDA wants to know and is empowering states to help root out it out.
In July 2023, the USDA and a bipartisan group of attorneys general in 31 states and the District of Columbia formed a task force to find price gouging and other anti-consumer business behavior and end it.
To get there, the Agricultural Competition Partnership (ACP) combined experts, state and local officials, and market research. Also, the USDA will funnel money and other resources to state attorneys general so they can keep a close eye on activities in their states.
“By placing necessary resources where they are needed most and helping states identify and address anticompetitive and anti-consumer behavior, in partnership with federal authorities, through these cooperative agreements we can ensure a more robust and competitive agricultural sector,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the time.
So far, Tennessee has not joined this group. However, two Nashville Democrats — Sen. Charlane Oliver and Rep. Aftyn Behn — urged Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti to do so last month.
“High prices at the grocery store have weighed heavily on Tennessee families, and they deserve to know that their state government is taking every possible step to ensure fairness in the marketplace,” Oliver said in a statement. “Joining this task force would demonstrate our commitment to protecting consumers and promoting economic fairness for all Tennesseans.”
Oliver and Behn worked this past legislative session to eliminate Tennessee’s sales tax on groceries. The effort was thwarted and the two said, “Republicans in the state legislature opted to pass a $5.5 billion tax handout for large corporations instead.”
However, they think joining the USDA task force on price gouging is one way that could help control costs of everyday goods for Tennesseans.
“Corporate consolidation and anti-competitive practices in food and agricultural markets have had a detrimental impact on the U.S. economy, leading to unfair competition and increased prices for families,” reads their letter to Skrmetti last month. “By joining the Agricultural Competition Partnership, your office would play a crucial role in addressing these issues and working towards solutions that can bring down the cost of groceries for Tennessee families.
“Additionally, this partnership can help find ways to boost wages for family farmers and small agricultural businesses, which are vital components of our state’s economy.”
Skrmetti’s office has not commented publicly about the request. But during National Ag Day in March, his office tweet-thanked the state’s “farmers for feeding our state and the nation!” They also tweeted photos of Skrmetii in a chore vest, work gloves, and rolled-up sleeves holding a baby goat and a bale of hay.
Tennessee’s motto “Agriculture and Commerce” was in action today on the Hill as we celebrated National Ag Day.
AG Skrmetti & Brandon Smith participated in a straw bale toss and saw some of our state’s finest livestock.
Tyson chicken barns, like these in West Tennessee, house more than 624,000 chickens each and produce massive quantities of waste. (Photo: John Partipilo)
Brenda Scott’s father came to west Tennessee as a sharecropper. By 1971 — as a result of hard work and government loans — he had 129 acres of his own, some of which his descendants occupy today.
His adult children and grandchildren belong to an enclave of Black farming families that have lived in Henderson County’s Cedar Grove community for generations. Some continue to raise hogs, cattle and crops. Others, like Scott, left for college and jobs, only to return to raise their kids.
Scott, along with many Cedar Grove families, have now become part of a novel legal challenge to a federal government farm loan program they say has allowed industrial poultry operations to proliferate at a cost to the long established community.
I really want to stress the fact that this was a predominantly Black community growing up; it’s legacy land we want our kids to grow up on and enjoy the freedoms and experiences we had growing up. . . My fear now is that there’s no regulations for these chicken operators.
– Brenda Scott, Cedar Grove, Tennessee farmer
Chicken farms have rapidly expanded across rural west Tennessee in recent years in order to supply product to Tyson Foods, the world’s largest poultry producer. The Fortune 500 company’s footprint has been rapidly expanding in the state.
Last year, Tyson opened a $425 million meat processing plant in nearby Humboldt, Tenn., its third large-scale Tennessee plant. The operation was made possible, in part, by $20 million in taxpayer incentives from the administration of Gov. Bill Lee.
Tyson relies on contract growers located within about a 60 mile radius of their slaughtering plants. The contractors raise chicks supplied by Tyson in massive barns built according to Tyson specifications and bring them to Tyson’s Humboldt plant for slaughter in order to get paid.
Scott, who is 56, said her community shares the same concerns as family farmers in adjoining counties who in recent years have tried — and failed — to get local or state governments to more closely regulate industrial chicken farming operations.
The operations produce vast quantities of chicken manure that she fears will pollute the well water her family relies on for drinking, the streams and creeks they fish for catfish and the quality of life that beckoned her back home to raise her two sons.
“I really want to stress the fact that this was a predominantly Black community growing up; it’s legacy land we want our kids to grow up on and enjoy the freedoms and experiences we had growing up,” she said. “There’s nothing like country living.”
“My fear now is that there’s no regulations for these chicken operators. What’s going to happen to my grandchildren drinking our well water? What about the air quality? I have asthma. So do members of my family. And nobody is telling us anything.”
Gov. Bill Lee greeting workers at the 2021 opening of a Tyson plant in Humboldt, Tennessee. (Photo: John Partipilo)
A new lawsuit brought by the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing Scott and neighbors who banded together to form “Concerned Citizens of West Tennessee,” is now challenging the federal government’s role in providing tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-backed loans to Tyson contract growers.
The litigation claims the United States Department of Agriculture, through the Farm Service Agency, is illegally subsidizing industrial chicken operations through a federal lending program intended to provide “family farms” with startup and operational capital.
“The FSA loan guarantees are illegal corporate welfare that contravene federal lending rules,” the lawsuit said.
“The federal loan guarantees are illegal because the lending program is reserved for helping ‘family farms.’ Because Tyson controls virtually all aspects of the industrial chicken growing operations, those facilities are not ‘family farms’ under applicable lending rules.”
The lawsuit also accuses the Farm Service Agency of failing to follow its own rules in conducting thorough environmental impact studies of farm operations seeking the loans — or in keeping local communities informed.
Instead, the federal agency only conducts perfunctory environmental reviews, before issuing “rubber stamped approval,” according to the suit.
The lawsuit names a pair of affiliated operations across the street from one another in the Cedar Grove community that are owned by two limited liability companies — Trang Nguyen, LLC and Nguyen LLC. Each LLC is owned by one individual.
Each operation has 8 chicken barns, massive single-story structures the length of a football field that hold 624,000 Tyson chickens at any given time.
The barns, along with an open-air chicken waste dumping area, lie adjacent to a subdivision of more than a dozen homes and are located within 3 miles of the Cedar Grove community’s four Black churches, Scott said. On the far side of the barns, a Mennonite farming community has lived for decades.
Scott is a longtime member of Bible Hill Baptist Church. Her husband pastors two of the other churches: Mount Pleasant Methodist and Seats Chapel Holiness Church.
“We see them every Sunday,” Scott said. “I can see them on my way to church.”
The USDA did not respond to a request for comment, and contact information for Trang Nguyen LLC and Nguyen LLC’s could not be immediately found.
Poultry farmers that contract with Tyson buy land and build barns in communities surrounding the company’s processing plants to serve as sole company suppliers. Many of the farmers have little or no prior farming background. A growing number of Vietnamese-American families have moved to Tennessee from elsewhere in the nation to start their own Tyson-contracted chicken-growing operations.
In 2017 — the same year Tyson announced its plans to open its Humboldt facility — Tennessee lawmakers rolled back a requirement for poultry growers to obtain water quality permits from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.
According to the lawsuit, Trang Nguyen, LLC bought 152 acres in Henderson County and Nguyen, LLC bought 128 acres; then the two farmers collectively secured federal loan guarantees of approximately $3.5 million to purchase, construct and operate the facilities.
The federal loan assistance can take the form of direct loans of up to $600,000 from the Farm Service Agency or up to $2,037,000 through a commercial lender with FSA loan guarantees. The loans are confined to farmers and their family members
The rules guide agency officials to define a “family farm” as one that is “recognized in the community as a farm,” and that has “day-to-day management operational decisions should be made by members of the family farm”
Tyson financed a large portion of the cost of the building the Nguyens’ facilities, contributing more than $960,000 in construction funding, the lawsuit said.
“The Nguyen’s will not be poultry ‘farmers,’” the lawsuit alleged. “They will be poultry caretakers who own neither chicken nor feed. They will be much like indentured servants, strapped with tremendous debt and laboring within an industrial meat complex in which they are required to follow Tyson’s rules, lest they suffer extreme financial consequences.”
The lawsuit notes that other government loan programs have determined that poultry contractors do not qualify for loans because of their integration into corporate operations.
Our legislature has passed laws that make it impossible for neighbors suffering or losing their home values to go to court. The courthouse doors to these individuals are closed.
– George Nolan, Southern Environmental Law Center
Tyson “exercise(s) such comprehensive control over poultry growers that those growers do not qualify for small business loans,” the lawsuit said, noting that the Small Business Association refuses to consider the poultry growers as “small businesses” for the purpose of loans because of their control by corporate poultry corporations.
The federal loans and loan guarantees must also include an environmental assessment of the planned farm operations to “determine whether a proposed action would significantly affect the environment.” and to “involve the public in the environmental review process as early as possible.”
The federal challenge follows years of failed efforts by family farmers in other rural west Tennessee communities to challenge poultry growing operations. Those efforts have largely been stymied by state deregulation.
In 2017 — the same year Tyson announced its plans to open its Humboldt facility — Tennessee lawmakers rolled back a requirement for poultry growers to obtain water quality permits from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.
In 2021, Tennessee legislature removed the power of local health boards to regulate industrial animal operations on health grounds, a preemptive move that came as the boards of health in Henderson County and adjacent Madison County weighed whether to regulate Tyson contract growers on health grounds.
And, noted George Nolan, an attorney with the environmental law firm, residents have little recourse to take legal action against the massive chicken operations because Tennessee is a Right to Farm state, a reference to a 1982 law enacted to protect farmers from nuisance lawsuits by city or suburban dwellers who moved to rural communities, then protested about the noise, odor and pesticides from farms next door.
“It’s a very problematic situation,” he said. “Our legislature has passed laws that make it impossible for neighbors suffering or losing their home values to go to court. The courthouse doors to these individuals are closed.”
James Lavel, who retired from the U.S. Navy, is an outspoken critic of the Tyson factory farms moving to west Tennessee. (Photo: John Partipilo)
James Lavel, a retired Navy commander in Henderson County, who has advocated for greater poultry operation regulation, said last week he has been frustrated by local and state elected leaders actions, and inactions, in the movement of large scale animal operations to the area, where the dangers of air and water pollution, and the overwhelming smell generated by chicken feces, have disrupted quality of life.
“I’ve gotten a hodgepodge of excuses from them,” Lavel said. “And then the FSA comes in here and uses our taxpayer money for this. If you just keep putting the people at risk you’re trying to feed, what’s the point? We need regulations. They exist to protect the people.”
Scott said the willingness of the federal government to provide Tyson contractors with federally subsidized loans and loan guarantees carry a particular sting for her, a second generation African-American farmer.
In 2018, Scott applied for the same loan program to grow watermelons on the tract she inherited from her dad, who passed away in 2003.
She was denied, she said, because she lacked “managerial experience.”
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
Curious how healthy food gets to your table? There are plenty of ways, and these days, Memphis seems to be at the center of them all.
In recent times, the Mississippi Delta has been a hotbed of new trends in the fields of agriculture, food, and health. While many companies are blazing new trails, a changing global landscape has pressed many into a constant stream of innovation. To celebrate how local organizations have become leaders in such practices, Crusonia on the Delta (formerly known as Davos on the Delta) is hosting its fourth annual summit to recognize how cities like Memphis are thriving in the agricultural sector.
This year’s virtual Food Is Health forum marks Crusonia’s fourth annual summit. Discussions and conversations will be centered around how cities like Memphis have pursued new growing methods in response to issues like climate change, cost, and resource availability. Other topics include the effect of processed food on health, food transparency & sustainability during COVID-19, and how agricultural innovation is centered around Memphis.
Many of Memphis’ innovations have been boosted by large entities like Agricenter International, while companies like The Seam and Indigo Ag are making huge strides in creating more efficient agricultural technology.
Some notable local speakers include Rob Carter (FedEx), Barry Knight (Indigo Ag), and M. David Rudd (president of University of Memphis). To reach a broader audience, this year’s virtual summit is free and open to the public.
Crusonia on the Delta’s Food Is Health forum takes place Wednesday, September 30th, from noon-6 p.m.
“Feature-length HD movies can be downloaded faster than you can read this sentence.”
That’s a quote from the Verizon website about just how fast its 5G Ultra Wideband mobile service will be for consumers.
Verizon’s network is coming to 20 U.S. cities this year. And, as a surprise to the cynical Memphian inside some of us, Memphis made the cut, and the network is expected to radiate across the city soon.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s office announced Thursday that Verizon had chosen the city. The service is already live in Chicago and Minneapolis.
“Today’s announcement is just the start for Memphis and we’re excited to bring the game-changing power of 5G Ultra Wideband service to consumers, business, and government agencies in 2019,” Kyle Malady, Verizon’s chief technology officer said in a statement.
How big of a deal is this? Well, according to Strickland and Verizon, it’s a big deal.
Strickland seemed convinced that making the cut was “another testament that our momentum is real and will play a large part in continuing to advance equitable economic development throughout our city.” (The statement from Memphis City Hall ensured Strickland’s election-year buzzword “momentum” was introduced somewhere into the news cycle.)
Verizon said the new network has the potential to affect ”artificial intelligence, education, healthcare, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT).”
[pullquote-1] “With its gigabit speeds and unprecedented response times, 5G can be thought of as the ’secret sauce’ that will make driverless cars, cloud-connected traffic control, and other applications that depend on instantaneous response and data analysis live up to their potential,” reads the Verizon website on its 5G network. “The possibilities are limitless.”
Verizon website says 5G isn’t just another iteration of the wireless network. It’ll be 20 times faster than the current 4G network, “making lag times nearly impossible to detect.” With this, augmented reality and virtual reality applications can work “seamlessly,” Verizon said. Also, industrial and machinery and robotics can be controlled remotely, it said.
Verizon/Facebook
Verizon said 5G will create jobs (but it didn’t specify what kinds of jobs those are or where they’d be located).
“By 2035, 5G will enable $12.3 trillion of global economic output and support 22 million jobs worldwide,” Ronan Dunne, executive vice president and group president of Verizon Wireless said in a statement. “Much of that growth will come from the digitization of transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and other physical industries.” Transportation. Agriculture. Manufacturing. A whole lot of each of those exists in the Memphis economic region. But you’ll only be able to connect to the lightning-fast new 5G network with a 5G-enabled device. If you have one, and you leave the 5G network zone, you’ll be automatically handed off to the current 4G network, Verizon said.
The other cities to get 5G this year are: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Des Moines, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Little Rock, Phoenix, Providence, San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C.
From The Washington Post: “Climate change may be global in its sweep, but not all of the globe’s citizens will share equally in its woes. And nowhere is that truth more evident, or more worrisome, than in its projected effects on agriculture.
“Several recent analyses have concluded that the higher temperatures expected in coming years — along with salt seepage into groundwater as sea levels rise and anticipated increases in flooding and droughts — will disproportionately affect agriculture in the planet’s lower latitudes, where most of the world’s poor live …”
In the U.S., that means the South’s agriculture will be most affected. Read the whole story here.
Verizon/Facebook 
Verizon/Facebook 
