A top U.S. Department of Justice official says antitrust laws “exist for a reason” and the division she leads is investigating monopolies that could be limiting the prices farmers get for what they sell or controlling what farmers pay for seeds and other inputs.
Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, head of the agency’s antitrust division, spoke to law students and professors at Drake University yesterday. “I chose Iowa very intentionally because we’ve been tasked at the DOJ antitrust division with a few things here and there regarding agriculture,” she said.
President Trump recently ordered the agency to investigate the four companies that dominate the meatpacking industry. Slater said the Department of Justice and the USDA are also working together to investigate why farmers’ input costs are rising.
“According to USDA’s data, since 2020 seed expenses have risen 18%; fuel and oil costs increased 32%; fertilizer expenses increased 37%, and interest expenditures for farmers spiked by 73%,” she said.
Slater told the crowd at Drake that a strain of conservatism that emerged in the 1980s favors a “soft law” approach to regulating business conduct, but she said recent antitrust cases in the tech industry suggest it’s wrong to assume market concentration is never a problem. Slater said the Department of Justice will follow the facts and go after any “bid rigging, price fixing and other anti-competitive business conduct” it may find.
(By Rachel Cramer, Iowa Public Radio/O. Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa also contributed to this story.)