Montanans need MCOOL and policy that protects our ag communities | Jack Owen
am a multigenerational rancher in southeast Montana, my family has ranched in the region for over 100 years. I care deeply about the native range and our way of life.
On Aug. 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee voted 17-6 to include mandatory country-of-origin labeling (MCOOL) for beef in the Farm Bill — a rare, genuinely bipartisan result in a Congress that agrees on almost nothing. Earlier this week, the committee voted 12-11 to approve that Farm Bill draft. This is excellent news for producers and consumers alike, who have been calling for the return of MCOOL for more than a decade. And now, we need to make sure this legislation goes all the way across the finish line.
Every steak, roast, and burger sold in a Montana grocery store should tell you the truth about where it came from. Right now, it doesn’t — and Congress has the chance to fix that this session.
Importantly, Joesley Batista, a major shareholder and board member of JBS Foods, a Brazilian-based meat packing corporation, met with President Trump in the Oval Office on Aug. 20 to discuss how additional Brazilian beef imports could help lower U.S. prices if Trump reduced tariffs. The following day, Trump took to social media to announce a plan to temporarily allow up to 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings into the U.S. without a tariff, with the administration saying the move would help bring down high beef prices.
Here’s what’s easy to miss in the back-and-forth of Washington: Montana’s congressmen are already on the right side of this fight. Rep. Zinke has cosponsored MCOOL legislation. Sen. Sheehy’s office has said plainly that American beef should be labeled as American beef. Sen. Daines has backed labeling reform for years, pushing to make sure only beef actually raised and slaughtered here carries the “Product of USA” name. That matters. In a fight where four multinational meatpacking conglomerates have spent a decade lobbying against transparency, having both Montana senators already saying the right thing out loud is not nothing. Now it’s time to turn that support into a finished bill — and to make sure Rep. Downing hears the same message this month.
Some will call this an unnecessary government mandate. It isn’t. Every other major food category in the American grocery store — seafood, produce, chicken, peanuts — already carries a country-of-origin label, without controversy and without the compliance disaster critics predict. Boxed beef already arrives at packing plants with a country-of-origin label attached. Imported live cattle already arrive branded by country. Packers already track cattle by quality grade and branded program through the entire process. All MCOOL requires is that the label already on the box follow the beef to the shelf. The infrastructure isn’t the obstacle. The will to use it is.
The numbers tell the real story. During the years MCOOL was fully in effect for beef, from 2013 to 2015, American cattle producers saw some of the highest returns per bred cow in decades. Within five years of repeal, those returns had fallen 83 percent. In that same window, Montana lost nearly 1,867 farms and ranches raising cattle and calves. A report done before the 2015 repeal showed 90% of consumers favored requiring food sellers to indicate on the package label the country of origin of fresh meat. This is about consumer safety, with more concerns about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or “mad cow disease” as it is infamously referred) from Brazilian, and other foreign markets, having clear labeling can help prevent unsafe food from entering into the distribution chain.
But here’s the point that matters most: this isn’t new ground for Montana, and we don’t need to wait on Washington to know how this fight goes. Montana wrote the playbook. In 2005, our own legislature passed the Beef Placarding Act, requiring country-of-origin labels at the meat counter years before federal law caught up — and that state law became the evidence Congress cited when it finally passed federal COOL in 2008.
When Congress went quiet, Montana kept fighting: five separate bills and resolutions since 2005, most recently Senate Joint Resolution 25 in 2025, all sending the same message. We have never stopped asking for this, and we are not going to stop now.
The fight is back on in Congress, and it will take pressure from home to finish it. Call Sen. Sheehy, Sen. Daines, and Rep. Downing this month. Thank Sheehy and Daines for standing with Montana producers so far, and ask them all to champion MCOOL through the Farm Bill’s final stretch — on the floor, and in conference with the House. Montana ranchers and consumers have waited eleven years. They shouldn’t have to wait one more Congress.
The National MCOOL Coalition, a broad-based coalition of national and regional organizations representing farm, ranch, rural, consumer and other interests, launched a petition this week calling on the White House and Congress to restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef. If you care about where your food comes from, consider signing the petition today.
Jack Owen and his family own and operate the L77 ranch near Ekalaka, MT. He is a fourth-generation Montanan cattle rancher, and Montana State alumnus, who also specializes in rangeland management and native plant identification.
