I don't think anyone here is proposing to eliminate the board of trade.  The board serves a useful purpose for producers and end users of commodity products such as corn, beans, jet fuel, etc. 

These are products which are true commodities, with very little difference from one producer's #2 corn to another, bought and sold in high volume with many sellers and end user buyers, and actually delivery of products to terminals and endusers. An enduser can actually purchase corn, beans wheat, jet fuel etc on futures contracts to actually use in his business at a known price at a future date. This is valuable.

The feeder cattle futures share almost none of those attributes. There may be large differences between feeder calves, there is almost no use of the feeder cattle contract by producers and there is no delivery.  It's all just paper with rules that tend to skew the system, such as any cash sales that use the word "fancy" are excluded from the cash settlement calculation.

As in the Drovers article, feeder cattle contracts are "thinly traded" and often "not liquid".   It is easy to see how a hedge fund trader who made $1.7 billion last year could easily buy and sell enough feeder contracts himself to make the market move so he could profit some more, often to the detriment of actual producers. Ref the often "unexplainable" limit up/down feeder contract moves in recent times.

I don't know what the answer is for the fat cattle contract or protection for Garvo. Even fat cattle do not share the above attributes of commodities such as corn, beans, wheat and jet fuel.  However perhaps eliminating the "dysfunctional" feeder cattle contracts would help the fat cattle contracts.

I do believe the feeder cattle producers and probably cattle feeders such as Garvo would be better off letting the cash markets, with cash sellers, buyers and delivery, handle the feeder cattle "price discovery" and eliminating the feeder futures contracts altogether. I fail to see what useful purpose the feeder cattle futures contracts serve to the industry except provide another casino for funds and their computers to play, with unfortunately, serious consequences for the actual "manure-on-their-boots" cow/calf producers.

edit to add: the folks who made $1.7 billion last year at a certain casino game are probably not going to be anxious to see that game eliminated.