Corporate Greed (Part 16 of 17): Carriage by carriage (#497)
- Rick LeCouteur
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
From the highway just outside Burnet, Texas, the trains don’t look remarkable at first.
Long, low cars. Pale stone. A steady, patient movement eastward.
If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it was just another freight run of grain, gravel, or something anonymous.
But it isn’t anonymous.
Those cars are filled with Hill Country caliche, scraped from land that took tens of thousands of years to form and only a few weeks to fracture and load.
Carriage by carriage, a county’s geology is leaving.
Caliche is not exotic. It isn’t rare earth. It doesn’t glow or promise a technological revolution.
It is simply useful: it compacts well, drains well, and is cheap to move once the rail spur is laid.
That combination makes it irresistible in a growth economy. Roads need it. Subdivisions demand it. Warehouses, data centers, and logistics hubs don’t rise without a foundation of crushed stone.
And so, the trains keep moving.
The Local Cost
For Burnet County, the impacts are immediate and tangible. Dust hangs in the air on dry days. Blasting rattles windows. Heavy trucks chew up county roads never designed for industrial traffic. Groundwater flow changes in ways that are hard to measure until wells begin to falter.
None of this is accidental.
The landowners who lease their caliche are acting rationally within the system they inhabit.
The companies extracting it are doing exactly what corporations are structured to do:
Convert assets into profit as efficiently as possible.
Rail allows them to scale that extraction far beyond what trucks alone could manage.
What is missing is not intent.
It is accountability.
Burnet County does not sell this resource. It does not meaningfully control its removal. Yet it will live with the consequences long after the last rail car departs.
The Value Trail
Follow the caliche east and north and you’ll find where the value accumulates:
Austin’s growth corridors.
San Antonio’s expanding edge.
Dallas Fort Worth’s endless grid of warehouses and access roads.
The stone becomes invisible there, buried beneath asphalt and concrete. No one in a new subdivision pauses to wonder where the road base came from. No data center press release mentions the county that lost a hillside so its foundations could be poured cheaply and on schedule.
This is how modern extraction works. The benefits are mobile. The costs are fixed.
Corporate Greed Without Villains
This is not a story about a single bad actor. That would be comforting, but it would also be dishonest.
Corporate greed in 2026 rarely wears a villain’s face.
Corporate greed arrives as:
contracts,
efficiency,
supply chains, and
the quiet logic of scale.
Rail cars do not ask permission. Balance sheets do not measure aquifer depletion. Growth models do not account for what a place used to feel like.
What disappears first is not the caliche itself, but the sense that a community has agency over its own future.
Beyond Burnet
Burnet County is not unique. Versions of this story are playing out across the Hill Country, across Texas, and across any region rich in something ordinary and cheap enough to exploit at scale.
Aggregates. Water. Wind corridors. Open land.
Each extraction is justified on its own merits. Each promises jobs, growth, progress. And each leaves behind a quieter question that rarely makes it into the economic analysis:
Who bears the cost when the resource is gone?
Carriage by Carriage
The trains keep moving. One car, then another. It doesn’t feel dramatic. That’s the point.
Corporate greed today is not loud. It doesn’t need to be. It advances patiently, efficiently, and legally, carriage by carriage, until a landscape is transformed and a community realizes that what was taken will not be coming back.
By then, the tracks are already laid.
What does this have to do with Vet Med?
From the outside, it doesn’t look dramatic.
A clinic is acquired. The sign stays up. The staff stays on. To a client, nothing appears to have changed.
If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it was just another day in veterinary practice.
But something is moving.
Carriage by carriage, veterinary medicine is being hauled away.
The Useful Layer
Veterinary medicine, like caliche, is not rare because it is exotic.
It is rare because it is useful:
It compacts trust.
It supports communities.
It bears weight quietly.
Independent practices formed slowly, shaped by local need, professional judgment, and long relationships with clients who knew their veterinarian by name.
This layer took decades to form. It cannot be rebuilt quickly once removed.
But in a growth economy, usefulness makes something vulnerable.
Veterinary practices generate predictable cash flow. They sit at the intersection of emotion, necessity, and expertise. That makes them irresistible once finance discovers how efficiently they can be standardized, leveraged, and scaled.
And so, the trains arrive.
The Rail Spur
Private equity did not invent veterinary medicine’s problems.
It simply built a rail spur into them.
Debt structures allow acquisitions to happen quietly. Centralization makes extraction efficient. Clinical judgment becomes protocol. Time becomes a metric. Compassion becomes a line item.
None of this requires malice. It only requires scale.
Once the infrastructure is in place, the movement is steady and relentless. Practice by practice. Doctor by doctor. Decision by decision.
Carriage by carriage.
The Local Cost
The consequences are felt first inside clinics:
Veterinarians work harder and feel less autonomous.
Technicians carry more load with less margin for error.
Young graduates learn medicine in systems optimized for throughput rather than mentorship.
Externally, clients sense it too, even if they can’t quite name it.
Appointments feel shorter.
Prices rise without explanation.
Decisions feel constrained, less personal, more transactional.
Like dust and road damage near a quarry, these effects are localized, immediate, and often dismissed as anecdotal.
But they accumulate.
The Value Trail
Follow the value and it becomes clear where it goes:
Upward - to holding companies, investment funds, and distant boards.
Outward - to expansion, consolidation, and the next acquisition.
What does not follow the value is accountability.
When trust erodes, it stays local. When burnout drives clinicians out of practice, it stays local. When a community loses a veterinarian who understood its animals, its farms, its rhythms, that loss is not captured in any quarterly report.
The extracted value becomes invisible. Buried beneath branding, growth metrics, and carefully managed narratives about support and investment.
Corporate Greed Without Villains
This is not a story about bad veterinarians or greedy individuals.
Corporate greed in veterinary medicine does not announce itself as greed.
It arrives as:
Efficiency
Support
Synergy, and
Access to capital.
Corporate greed speaks the language of improvement while quietly changing what the improvement is for.
Rail cars do not ask whether a profession can survive being standardized. Balance sheets do not measure moral distress. EBITDA does not capture why someone became a veterinarian in the first place.
Beyond the Clinic
Burnet County is losing caliche.
Veterinary medicine is losing something just as foundational:
Once professional autonomy is fractured and hauled away, it does not return easily.
Once trust is treated as a resource to be mined rather than protected, it erodes.
Once a calling is converted into a commodity, the transformation is hard to reverse.
Each acquisition is defensible in isolation. Each protocol makes sense on its own. Each decision feels small.
That is how this works.
Carriage by Carriage
Veterinary medicine is not being destroyed in a single dramatic event.
Veterinary medicine is being altered patiently, legally, and efficiently, practice by practice, policy by policy.
Carriage by carriage.
And the saddest thing of all?
By the time the profession fully understands what has been removed, the tracks are already laid.
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