Our Cows vs. Their Yachts
I’m going to say this slowly: Importing foreign beef to lower prices will not rebuild the American cattle herd. It will do the opposite.
Right now, we are headed into fall. For most professional cattle producers, that means one thing: calf sales. The 90-day window of October, November, and December is when most ranchers bring their year’s work to town. It is when we find out if we can pay the bank, fix the fence, keep the hired hand, buy a new tractor, and maybe put a little away to survive the next drought.
This is the same time frame President Trump has picked to flood the market with imported beef in the name of “lowering prices.” The timing could not hurt working cattlemen more if it were designed that way. Maybe it was?
Cattle country is not abstract policy. It is real places facing real problems. States that raise the bulk of this nation’s beef are staring down tremendous droughts. Grass is short, hay is scarce, and feed costs are at record highs from those shortages. The rational move for many producers right now is to shrink their herds. You sell cows when you cannot feed them. You cull deep because the pasture will not carry them. That is how you survive to next year.
If we want the American cattle herd to rebuild when conditions improve, producers need to bank cash now.
Profit is not greed. Profit is seed stock; it is heifers held back instead of sold; it is the capital to restock pasture when the rains come. You cannot grow the national herd by guaranteeing that the people who grow it will lose money due to foreign beef imports.
Imports do not solve the problem. They compound it. Bringing in foreign beef during our calf marketing season undercuts domestic prices when ranchers are most exposed. It sends a signal to every producer trying to decide whether to retain heifers: sell them. It tells every young rancher considering expansion: do not. You cannot import competition with the stated goal of lowering prices and expect domestic growth. Period.
If the concern is truly the American consumer, then let’s talk about what would actually help them buy beef. Start with enforcing antitrust laws. Today, roughly 85 percent of fed cattle slaughter is controlled by four companies. That is not a market; it is a monopoly. When packers have that much leverage, they set the price they pay for cattle and the price consumers pay for steaks. Producers get squeezed on one end, families get squeezed on the other, and the margin in the middle gets very comfortable, and it has always been that way.
It gets worse. Two of those four dominant packers are headquartered in South America. Those are the same regions we turn to when we import foreign beef. So the policy loop looks like this: Washington leans on imports to lower prices, which drives down what American ranchers receive, while multinational packers with overseas ties capture the upside. The American Cattle Producer is sold out to overseas interests, and we call it a win for consumers. That’s not a win; that’s a trap.
The trap is an ultra-niche American Beef market that only the super-wealthy can afford, because the national cattle herd continually shrinks due to import-driven price declines. At the same time, the average American consumer is fed cheap product that hopefully doesn’t include capybara.
The result of decades of this approach is not theoretical; it’s current. The American cattle herd is now at its smallest in half a century. That did not happen because ranchers forgot how to raise cattle. It happened because corporate monopoly power and federal policy, intentionally or not, have worked to keep cattle prices low enough for packers to maximize margins. Cheap cattle today means fewer cattle tomorrow. We are living in tomorrow, where the packer math is still focused on buying the cheapest cattle possible to make the most money.
There is a path to lower beef prices that actually lasts. We rebuild the American cattle herd and our domestic beef supply by letting producers make money so they can increase production. When herds expand and supply rises, store prices will fall. But that price decline is sustainable because it is built on more cattle, not on hollowing out the people who produce it. Business can’t grow making less money, so let the rancher make money to expand his herd. Then, due to more supply, prices on ground beef come down and he still makes a living because he’s selling more cattle to the packer.
Ranchers are not asking for a handout. We are asking for a fair shot. We are asking Washington to stop picking the 90 days that hurt us most to prove a political point during election season. We are asking for the chance to do what we have always done: take care of the land, raise the cattle, and rebuild when the rains return.
Importing foreign beef to lower prices will not get us there. Letting American producers earn enough to grow will. The choice is simple: either the farm and ranch families of the American Producer make less money from competing with cheap foreign product, or the Billionaire Multinational Beef Packers make less money because they have to buy American product for their store shelves and adjust their prices to be marketable to consumers.
You can’t say “America First” while opening up the border and telling foreign beef packing corporations to get in front of American Producers.
Collin Duprel is a guest columnist for the Rapid City Post. Opinions expressed may not necessarily represent the views of the Rapid City Post, its affiliates, or advertisers.
