Dateline Minneapolis/St. Paul. October 2011.

“Another lawsuit has been filed alleging that Land O’Lakes Inc. and other major dairy producers illegally conspired to drive the price of milk up by slaughtering a half-million dairy cows since 2003,” according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

It’s scary when Big Agriculture starts to sound more like Big Mafia. At least the don in “The Godfather” only slaughtered a single horse for that famous horse-head-in-a-bed scene.

We were temporarily heartened two weeks ago when news broke that Land O’Lakes Inc. would be taking over the DeCoster egg operations in Maine.

It seemed at last that the bad egg himself, Austin “Jack” DeCoster, might be getting out of the egg business.

DeCoster’s empire began in Turner with a small flock of laying hens. From that, he built an empire of chicken and hog farms from here to Iowa.

But Decoster too often seemed to operate on the wrong side of labor, health and animal treatment standards.

In 2010, Decoster’s Midwestern operations were linked to a massive salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds of people.

Before that, DeCoster’s Turner farm was the subject of a hidden-camera expose of animal cruelty that resulted in state sanctions and fines.

And before that, a massive fine was levied involving the working conditions for Hispanic farm workers.

Land O’Lakes, we hoped, might be a national company that would more carefully guard the reputation of Maine’s egg industry and stay out of the local and national headlines.

After all, the company’s symbol, the fetching young Indian maiden on its butter cartons, was the epitome of wholesomeness and virtue.

Unfortunately, a quick Web search tells a different story.

Land O’Lakes has been implicated, along with other major producers, in price-fixing schemes in both the dairy and egg industries.

In 2007 and 2008, egg prices in the U.S. skyrocketed by more than 40 percent. Restaurants and processors alleged in court that Land O’Lakes and other producers conspired to reduce production to increase prices.

Worse, when questioned about the decrease in output, the egg producers tried to pin the blame on animal-rights activists, claiming they were forced to provide better conditions for fewer hens.

That, apparently, was a lot of chicken manure. The producers simply got together and conspired to raise prices.

Land O’Lakes eventually paid $25 million to buy its way out of the suit.

Now the company and other major producers stand accused of doing the same thing in the dairy industry.

Milk buyers in Minnesota claim the dairy producers used a “herd retirement program” to cut the milk supply.

While that conjures images of elderly cows enjoying a life of pastoral leisure, it really meant slaughtering 507,000 animals between 2003 and 2010 to decrease milk production by 9.67 billion pounds and inflate prices.

Read that to mean consumers lost nearly $12 billion in the process.

That suit has not yet been settled, but the stories hint of a DeCoster-like pattern of behavior that should concern regulators and consumers here.

Land O’Lakes’ new management team should, of course, be welcomed to Maine. But they should also know that business as usual at the former DeCoster farms is unacceptable.

rrhoades@sunjournal.com

The opinions expressed in this column represent the views of the ownership and editorial board.

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