Is Dallas’s Dean Foods a Monopoly?

Because of complaints from farmers, a Senate committee will look into the question today. Greg Engles built Dean after buying a small dairy in Puerto Rico and seeing for himself how aggregation could help cost control in the dairy business. The company is now stout, there’s no doubt about it, with over $12 billion in sales. But a monopoly? When a company controls only 15 percent of the processing can it set monopolistic pricing ? Or is this an exercise in farm-state senators going through the motions for the folks back home?