What the Hell Is Happening With Beef?
Ranchers are finally getting a fair price. Families are paying too much for beef. So where is the money going?
I’ve heard from cattle producers all over the country in the last several days. Southern Kansas. Choteau. St. Regis. Grass Range. Clear across eastern Montana. Some of them voted for Donald Trump three times, and there’s a bewilderment in their voices I haven’t heard before.
“Doesn’t he know who elected him?”
“How can he dump us like that?”
I’m not interested in saying I told you so. These are my neighbors. They’re cattlemen and women. They’re people trying to make payments, raise families, keep land intact and hopefully hand something down to another generation. When your livelihood feels threatened, fear comes right to the surface. And right now, there’s plenty to be afraid of.
President Trump has moved to temporarily expand lower-tariff access for another 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef trimmings over 90 days, saying the move will help bring down beef prices while America rebuilds its cattle herd. It follows an earlier expansion of access for Argentine beef this year.
I understand the first part of that motivation. Have you looked at the price of hamburger lately? Families are getting hammered at the grocery store. Ground beef prices have risen dramatically over the past five years. Steak isn’t exactly cheap, either. If you’re trying to feed a family, those numbers matter.
But here’s where things get strange. The rancher raising that beef may finally be getting a price that makes the economics of raising cattle work. So if the rancher thinks cattle are finally bringing a fair price and the family at the grocery store thinks beef costs too damn much, maybe we ought to ask a different question:
If the rancher is finally getting a fair price and the family buying the hamburger is paying too damn much, what the hell is happening between the pasture and the plate?
I Know a Little Something About Cows
I’m a fourth-generation Montana rancher and serve on the board of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association. I’ve been around cattle and horses nearly my entire life. I was in my first rodeo at three years old and have probably thrown my leg over a thousand head of horses since then. At one point, we had the number-one $Beef Angus bull in the industry and donor cows in the top one percent for $Beef.
I don’t say that because it makes me the smartest cowboy in Montana. Quite the opposite. Every rancher I know knows something I don’t.
That’s one of the great things about this life. You learn a little something every day you fix fence and a barb bites your finger or snags your leg. You learn wearing out your jeans horseback and your boots in a muddy yard. You learn when something goes wrong at two in the morning. You learn from your dad and your granddad, your neighbor down the road, the veterinarian, or the old cowboy leaning against the fence who hasn’t said anything for twenty minutes and then casually tells you exactly what you’ve been doing wrong.
Every rancher I know knows something I don’t.
And somewhere in all of that, you learn one thing pretty quickly: cows don’t operate on Washington’s schedule.
The United States cattle herd is around its smallest level in roughly 75 years. Years of drought, expensive feed and other rising production costs encouraged producers to reduce their herds. Rebuilding them isn’t a matter of flipping a switch on a factory floor. You retain a heifer instead of selling her. You breed her. You wait. She calves. You raise that calf. And all the while you’re betting on rain, grass, feed prices, cattle markets and about a thousand other things you don’t control.
Hail, tornadoes, years of drought, floods and fire. An unstable climate can wipe out years of careful decisions in a season. Some days it feels apocalyptic. But I like to stay calm, so let’s call it f*in’ apocalyptic.
Cows don’t operate on Washington’s schedule.
We’ve Got Some Heifer Calves to Sell You
The Montana Cattlemen’s Association put out a statement after the administration’s announcement asking some pretty basic questions. Where is this additional beef coming from? How is it being inspected? And how exactly is importing substantially more beef for 90 days supposed to rebuild the American cattle herd?
MCA President Tim Brunner put it better than I can:
“If you think you can rebuild a national cow herd in 90 days, we have got some heifer calves to sell you.”
There’s another concern here that shouldn’t get lost in the economics: knowing where our food comes from and knowing it has been properly inspected. MCA’s statement pointed to a recent recall involving Argentine beef that entered U.S. commerce without receiving required import reinspection.
That’s not an argument that foreign beef is inherently unsafe. It is an argument that when we dramatically expand imports, inspection, traceability and transparency damn well matter.
Consumers ought to be able to make informed choices, too. If you want imported beef because it’s cheaper, fine. If you want to spend your money on beef raised by American cattle producers, you ought to be able to know that’s what you’re buying. That seems less like protectionism to me than basic information in a functioning marketplace.
If you want to buy American beef, you ought to be able to know that’s what you’re buying.
So Who Gets the Money?
This is where the conversation gets more uncomfortable. The people buying beef are hurting. The people raising cattle have spent years getting squeezed and finally have some leverage in the market. Those two facts can exist at the same time.
Lowering the price paid to the rancher isn’t necessarily the same thing as lowering the price paid by the family standing at the meat counter.
The beef industry between those two people is enormously concentrated. Four major companies dominate U.S. fed-cattle processing, a concentration that ranch organizations and policymakers have argued can reduce competition and leave producers with fewer buyers for their cattle. That concentration has been debated in Washington for years.
The rancher and the consumer shouldn’t have to be enemies in this equation.
This week I had the chance to talk directly with Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy about it. We were both in Helena for the Greater Northwest Rail Summit. Tim was supposed to be there talking about trains, but cattle have a way of wandering through the fence and into whatever conversation you’re trying to have.
Tim and I have a few things in common. We both fly airplanes. We’ve both jumped out of perfectly good aircraft. We’ve both managed to put an airplane into the ground in ways we’d rather not repeat. We run cows, rope calves and have spent some time talking with people under fire of one kind or another.
So I asked him about beef.
Tim told me he’d tried to resist this push and had “held ’em off for a year.”
That phrase stayed with me. Maybe it’s because I’ve known Marines who served in Vietnam. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched ranchers fight prairie fires. When somebody says they were trying to hold something off, I picture people trying to hold a line while something much bigger bears down on them.
In Washington, sometimes that thing is money and power.
Sheehy also spoke publicly at the summit about the grip a handful of major meat processors have on America’s beef industry. And on that point, he’s right.
I’ve criticized Tim before. I’ll probably criticize him again. That’s how this is supposed to work. But honest conversation also means giving somebody credit when you believe they’re right. It means listening. It means walking a mile in somebody else’s boots before deciding you know exactly why they did what they did.
Honest conversation means giving somebody credit when they’re right, even when you disagree with them about plenty of other things.
Jon Tester spent 18 years operating inside that same system. Different parties. Different men. Same Washington. Same enormous interests trying to influence public policy.
Which leaves me wondering something bigger than whether one senator or one president got one policy right:
How much power do ordinary producers have when enormous economic interests decide they want something?
We’re Not Pawns
This is no joke to the people raising the food.
Sometimes it feels like we’re pawns on somebody else’s board. One policy decision gets made, one tariff changes, one trade agreement gets signed, one computer key gets hit in Washington, and thousands of miles away somebody is looking at their calves and recalculating whether they can afford another year.
Ranching isn’t just a balance sheet, either. Your business may also be your home. Your land may be your retirement. Your cattle may represent decades of genetics. The place you’re struggling to hold onto may be the same place your grandparents struggled to hold onto and the place you hope your grandchildren will someday call home.
Then pile on drought, fire, hail, debt, equipment costs, feed prices, health insurance and the ordinary uncertainty of raising living animals for a living. There is a mental-health component to rural America that we don’t talk about enough. You can’t separate the economic health of rural communities from the human beings living in them.
When Washington talks about “the cattle supply,” we’re talking about families.
There are more than 30 organizations in Montana representing different pieces and perspectives of agriculture, including groups like the Montana Cattlemen’s Association, Montana Stockgrowers Association and Montana Farmers Union. We don’t always agree. Hell, put enough cattlemen in one room and we’ll eventually find something to argue about.
But listen to people across cattle country right now and you hear a remarkably similar concern: decisions affecting our livelihoods are being made a very long way from the people who actually understand what it takes to raise the animal.
That ought to matter.
Maybe Cheap Beef Isn’t the Same as Affordable Beef
There is a legitimate problem here that cattle producers shouldn’t dismiss: Americans need affordable food. A working family shouldn’t have to treat a package of hamburger like a luxury item. But American ranchers also need to be able to stay in business.
Those shouldn’t be competing goals.
If the way we make beef cheaper today is by making raising cattle less economically sustainable tomorrow, we haven’t solved much. We’ve simply moved the bill down the road.
Cheap beef today isn’t much of a bargain if it costs us the people who produce our beef tomorrow.
And this is where I think we need a much bigger conversation about food security. We talk about American energy independence. We talk about domestic manufacturing. We worry about depending on foreign countries for computer chips, pharmaceuticals, oil and critical minerals.
Why wouldn’t we think the same way about food?
Montana has something incredibly valuable: grass, water, open land, cattle, agricultural communities and generations of accumulated knowledge about how to turn sunlight and grass into some of the highest-quality protein in the world.
Once those producers disappear, rebuilding them isn’t easy either.
You can’t rebuild a ranching culture in 90 days.
The Joy Is Part of It, Too
I don’t want to make ranching sound miserable. There is real joy in it. There’s joy in spending a day working cattle with your family. There’s something satisfying about riding home tired and dirty after accomplishing something together. There are things you learn about patience, responsibility, animals, weather, land and yourself that are difficult to learn anywhere else.
My family has been knocking around this country for generations. We have family stories about my great-grandfather Billy Earl Cathey running the Sundance Kid out of Montana Territory and my grandfather getting into the kind of trouble in the streets of Alzada that makes modern family gatherings considerably more entertaining.
We’ve been stubborn for a long time. But stubbornness alone won’t preserve ranching. Neither will nostalgia.
If we want cattle producers to keep producing, the economics have to work. If we want American families to keep buying American beef, the economics have to work for them too.
The family raising the beef and the family buying the beef should both be able to make it.
That means we should be looking hard at everything between those two ends of the chain: competition among packers, processing capacity, imports, trade policy, labeling, market transparency and whether producers and consumers are actually benefiting from the system we’ve built.
It also means refusing to turn this into another stupid red-team-versus-blue-team argument.
Some of the angriest ranchers I’m hearing from voted for Donald Trump three times. A Republican senator from Montana is raising concerns about concentration in meatpacking. The Montana Cattlemen’s Association is pushing back against a Republican administration’s policy. Other agricultural organizations are raising their own concerns.
Good. That’s democracy.
Your party shouldn’t matter more than your livelihood, your community or the truth. Supporting somebody in an election doesn’t mean surrendering your right to tell them when you think they’re wrong. And disagreeing with somebody politically doesn’t mean refusing to acknowledge when they get something right.
Maybe we’d all be better off if politicians had to earn our support one decision at a time instead of inheriting it because of the letter beside their name.
Your party shouldn’t matter more than your livelihood, your community or the truth.
There’s another conversation underneath all of this about money and power in politics. I recently talked with Montana Free Press reporter John Adams about dark money and just how difficult it can be to escape its influence. We’ll share more of that conversation soon, because the farther you follow this beef story, the harder it becomes to avoid the question of who actually has influence when policy gets made.
For now, I keep coming back to something simpler.
I’ve spent my life around cattle. I’ve had some pretty good ones. I’ve been horseback since I was little enough that somebody probably should have questioned the wisdom of putting me up there. I’ve worn out jeans, boots and gloves, fixed a lot of fence and donated a fair amount of skin to barbed wire.
And I still learn something from another rancher every time I shut up long enough to listen.
There are thousands of people across Montana and millions across cattle country who possess knowledge you simply cannot acquire from a briefing paper in Washington. They learned it through droughts and blizzards, calving seasons and cattle wrecks, good years and terrible ones. They learned it from parents and grandparents, neighbors and mistakes.
Maybe before we try to fix the American cattle industry from Washington, we ought to listen to a few more of them.
Every rancher knows something I don’t. Maybe Washington ought to admit the same thing.
Take care of the land. Take care of each other.
—Steve
Honest Conversations. Real Montana.
