Why Is the US Importing 300,000 More Tons of Beef? (A Farmer's Take)

Why is the US importing more beef right now, and who does it actually help? Here's the honest answer from a farmer who raises cattle for a living.

So President Trump has decided to lift quotas and allow the import of an extra 300,000 TONS of beef this year.

This being beef related news, a lot of people have reached out with questions.

So let's just call this what it is....

Who this actually helps

A massive gift to the Big 4 Meatpackers, who were very large donors in the last electoral cycle and have seen their margins collapse as cattle prices have skyrocketed over the last few years.

When a president does something unpopular that benefits absolutely no one but the 3-4 corporations that dominate a given industry, it's usually that simple.

Agriculture works just like the wars every President starts....

and insurance and pharma and tech and banking and....

wait, is our government perhaps not really "of and for the people"?

(If you're not sure who the Big 4 are or why they matter this much, here's the full breakdown of the companies that control 85% of America's beef.)

Why it won't actually rebuild the herd

The pretense for this is that it will lower beef prices for consumers and incentivize farmers to retain cattle for breeding and grow the national herd, which is at a 70 year low.

Problem is, the ranchers raising the cattle still need an income, and are dealing with absolutely insane runaway prices on land, fuel, feed, fertilizer, equipment, etc.

So they aren't going to just magically start growing the herd. They'll just keep selling and be forced to take worse prices.

There might be a few extra heifers retained here and there, but to make real progress you'd have to pair higher imports with some kind of incentive or payment for retaining cattle.

But that would take a political will to get creative and do something other than pay farmers to plant more commodity crops which hasn't really been demonstrated in quite a few generations.

So instead we just get the "undercutting ranchers" strategy.

Which seems crazy, and is really pissing off those ranchers, but isn't really surprising to anyone who's been alive and voting in the last checks notes 80 years or so.

Putting small farms out of business so they sell their land to bigger operations or Private Equity backed real estate or mineral exploration firms is good for GDP or Market Returns or the Reptilian Overlords Donors or whatever.

(On that last point specifically, here's why American farms are disappearing and what happens to the land. And for why cattle prices got this crazy in the first place, here's why beef is so expensive right now.)

Where is all this extra beef actually coming from?

Anyway.

The other part of this story is the "where's all this extra beef coming from?" bit.

And no one seems to want to answer that question, which makes one think the answer is..... NOT GREAT.

Oh, and then there's all the wild horses being slaughtered for some reason, which makes one kinda wonder if....

ya know....?

I'm not saying I think that's what is happening. It probably isn't.

I haven't really looked into it, and even if I did, I don't believe literally anything I read from any source anymore. The Main Stream Media, Random AI Slop Posts, the US Government, and my 3 Year Old all have basically the same odds of accurately depicting global events.

But now that I'm thinking about it, isn't the extra meat coming from Wild Horses kind of the best case scenario here? Strictly from a health perspective of course! I am pro wild horses and against eating them.

American commodity beef is not exactly a sanctified product either

I'm just saying, where do we get off acting like commodity AMERICAN BEEF is some sanctified product that would be unfathomably horrible to adulterate?

"Oh thank god, muh beef is guaranteed to be from a country that sprays more chemicals than anywhere else, approves new chemicals that literally no one else will, AND WHERE 20% OF FEEDLOT STEERS ARE F&@#ING LACTATING!!!!!"

(That last one is not a joke. Here's the research on lactating feedlot steers.)

The threads are fraying

Anyway.....

I don't really know how to tie this up.

Every day the threads holding the American Food/Farm system together appear to fray a little more....

• We lose 77 farms every single day.
• Glyphosate somehow has stronger federal protections than the wild horses that live in national parks.
• Everything from lettuce to granola is getting recalled
• And prices keep going up for the privilege of consuming all of it.

(That glyphosate line is not hyperbole either. Here's the Supreme Court ruling that gave Bayer-Monsanto federal protection from state cancer-warning lawsuits.)

The food system appears to be collapsing after 50+ years of corporate assault, and it's going to require many years of effort and cooperation by many brilliant people to fix it.

What you can actually do in the meantime

Unfortunately, we all need to eat in the meantime, and you can't inspect a processing plant to be sure that the meat being ground is labeled "definitely NOT horse meat".

But you CAN know the farmer you're buying from.

It feels wrong to go hard on a pitch after all that, so I'll just say this:

In a food system that is getting bigger, more consolidated, more corporate, and less trustworthy, the path forward is to find farmers you can know by name and who proudly eat (and feed their loved ones) the same exact food they are selling.

Whether it's us or another small farm, actually knowing the people who produce your food is the best choice you can make right now.

If you'd trust us to be that farm, we would be honored. You can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

Your Farmer,

Josh

P.S. It seems like a lot of you have drawn the same conclusion, because FOUR people ordered Half Beef Shares by 10am this morning. This puts us on a 35 cow pace for the week, which would be absolutely insane and unsustainable for us, but only 0.3% of the beef harvested every single day in a single one of the Big 4's Mega-Slaughterhouses. Perspective.....