An outcry is being heard from Texas to Wyoming ranchers and beyond, against the idea of punching grocery store beef prices down by punching up the amount of Argentinian beef America buys.
On Sunday, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he has a plan to cure sticker shock at American grocery stores.
“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” Trump said. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down. The one thing that’s kept up is beef. And if we buy some beef, I’m not talking about that much, from Argentina, it would help Argentina, which we consider a very good country.”
Backlash was almost immediate from the farming and ranching community, but Trump doubled down on that idea Wednesday, saying that ranchers just “don’t understand” things.
“The cattle ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put tariffs on cattle coming into the United States including a 50% tariff on Brazil,” he said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible!
“It would be nice if they would understand that,” Trump continued in the post. “But they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking also.”
But it is President Trump who misunderstands the cattle industry, Crook County rancher and former state legislator Tyler Lindholm told Cowboy State Daily.
“And my qualm isn’t with President Trump himself,” he added. “He can’t know everything right. Just like every other president who came before him, or anybody else, they’re all trying to understand the various issues that could crop up in a million different economies. And the beef economy, whoever’s advising him in this regard, did a really piss-poor job, and managed to draw the ire of most of the ranching world.”
Lindholm said if Trump really wants to make meaningful progress on affordable beef prices for consumers, the right place to look isn’t other countries. It’s regulatory reform right here at home.
“There’s a regulatory issue in almost every economy,” Lindholm said. “And much like any economy, if we’ve got an issue in an economy where the prices are skyrocketing and things are getting out of hand, we should not be looking first and foremost on how to prop up that scenario, right?”
The “scenario” right now, Lindholm added, are regulations which have led to four big meat-packing plants owning 80% of America’s cattle herds before processing. Combine that with regulations that are restricting the sale of state-inspected meat across state lines, even though state inspections have to follow federal guidelines. The cure to the market ills those situations are causing is to change the regulations.
“Those regulations have created a monopoly, and we should break that monopoly’s back,” Lindholm said.
Grocery Store Money Doesn’t Make It To The Ranch
While recent cattle auction prices have been above average this year, the high prices that consumers see in grocery stores don’t necessarily translate into a pay-day for ranchers. That’s a disconnect more Americans need to understand better, Lindholm believes.
“Cattle futures and cattle prices are just like any other commodity,” Lindholm said. “And cattle ranchers, farmers, have worked their tails off for decades trying to get to this price point to where you can actually afford to keep cattle ranching. I mean, I think everyone looks across the American West, they’re not seeing a bunch of people jumping into ranching all of a sudden. It’s not like it’s a make-money-quick scheme or anything like that.”
Fellow Crook County rancher Senator Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, agreed, adding there’s often a big disconnect between the prices consumers see in the store, and the prices cattle ranchers are getting for their beef.
He thinks many people would be surprised if they knew how little cattle ranchers actually make.
“My son makes roughly what a janitor in a school makes, for working 16 hours a day,” Driskill said.
Those kinds of wages mean many farmers and ranchers are living in substandard conditions — yet still getting beaten up over high beef prices, even though they have little control over those prices, and don’t typically get to keep much of that retail price which consumers are seeing.
“The beef industry, which I’m a part of and have been all my life, has been notoriously unprofitable for decades,” Driskill said. “And that’s come at the hands partially of the federal government.”
Wyoming Is Losing Ranches
The unprofitability of ranches has led to losing ranches by the thousands in America over the last several decades. Wyoming lost an average of 5.5 of its farm and ranches every week for the past five years, according to the latest USDA Census of Agriculture, dropping 1.2 million acres of food production for the period.
While some of that is demographic — farmers and ranchers are retiring — the economic realities of the industry are making ranching far less than enchanting to that next generation which would normally be taking over. Young people are taking into account the kinds of lives their parents and grandparents are living — sleeping on a fortune in land, while making janitorial wages for sunup to sundown work.
The trend is also driving farms and ranches to get larger and larger, trying to beat those economics.
“We’ve seen a shift, even in Wyoming, from small family farms to, even if they’re not corporate farms, they’re huge (operations),” Driskill said. “You can kind of argue the numbers, but in our area, up here in the northeast, you used to be able to make a passable living for a family with 100 and some cows. Now, depending on whose numbers you use, it’s probably 700, 800 cows. So, we’ve really just broken out the base end of the family farms and turned them into corporate operations almost. They’re huge. They’re sprawling.”
Americans have to make a choice, Driskill said.
“Do they want family farms?” he said. “Or do they want big corporate farms. And then do you want to have your food produced domestically, or do you want to import it? Because there’s other countries that will definitely produce product cheap enough to keep us broke.”
5,000 Letters And Counting
Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, said he’s seen more than 5,000 letters submitted so far from fellow ranchers across the nation opposing the idea of buying more Argentinian beef to fix grocery store prices.
That’s heartening, he said, but, while he, too, found Trump’s comments concerning, the devil is in the details, and he’s waiting to see those details to better understand what’s being proposed.
“I think (Trump’s statements) certainly caused justifiable concern among our cattle producers in Wyoming and across the nation,” he said. “It caused some significant price declines in the prices being paid for cattle over the last few days. So short-term, there’s no doubt that it’s been harmful to us.”
Longer term, though, the situation is hard to assess without specific details about the plans, Magagna said.
“The President has said more beef from Argentina,” he said. “”I’ve not yet been able to learn how he will accomplish that. Is he reducing the tariff or is he lifting a quota? Is he specifying what type of products can come in?”
Meanwhile, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has just unveiled a six-page plan for agriculture, which, Magagna said, appears to have many things that the nation’s agricultural producers have been asking for.
“I mean there are a lot of things in there that are very attractive to us,” he said. “Increasing the availability of grazing on federal lands, reducing the whole host of regulatory constraints, expanding meat processing capacity, assuring strict enforcement of the rule, which will become effective Jan. 1 that beef cannot be labeled U.S. beef unless it was born, raised and processed in the U.S. Those are all good things that will be, I believe, very helpful to our industry.”
Questionable Health Protocols In Argentina
Mark Eisele, a rancher near Cheyenne and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, meanwhile, said high prices are really about supply and demand.
“(Trump’s) intent might be good, but he has no understanding of the complexity of the cattle markets,” Eisele said. “It’s one of the most complex commodity markets in the world.”
America has plenty of supply, Eisele said. But demand has also remained high, and that’s what’s really been keeping prices higher. The cure for that is just time, Eisele said. Higher prices will attract people to invest in raising more cattle, as well as cause fewer people to buy it, until things reach a new equilibrium.
Eisele also believes people are confused about how global markets play into America’s beef prices.
“The reason we send some of our beef offshore is we should get a better price for it offshore — expensive steaks, expensive roasts,” he said. “And then we traditionally brought in some of the Mexican for lean hamburger.”
That transaction helps bring cheaper beef for America’s dinner plates, while allowing farmers and ranchers to seek a premium for their product.
Mexico, he added, has an excellent supply of cattle, with acceptable health protocols. Unlike Brazil and Argentina.
“Argentina and Brazil’s both have a disease management and timely reporting gap,” he said. “They’ve had instances of hoof and mouth that they have not reported, or not reported timely, as in like six months, two years later. That really puts the American cattle herd at risk.”
Right now, Argentina buys $5 million worth of American beef, Eisele added, and has sold America $800 million worth of beef in the same period.
“So that’s the gap,” he said. “Bringing in their beef isn’t going to be enough.”
Gov. Mark Gordon echoed the concerns of Wyoming ranchers on Thursday afternoon.
“Our livestock producers take great pride in supplying U.S. beef,” he said. “And while prices at the store are currently unusually high, we should look at domestic solutions to increase the number of U.S.-raised beef. Increasing our reliance on cattle imports is not the best answer for our ranchers, farmers, or U.S. consumers.”
Gordon, like Magagna, praised the six-page agriculture plan released by Rollins, which he said would expedite deregulatory reforms and boost processing capacity.
“Wyoming’s local producers produce some of the most high-quality beef, which significantly contributes to national beef production efforts,” Gordon said. “This is one of the issues I expect the recently appointed Cowboy State Agricultural Initiative Working Group to address quickly.”
Dandelion Regulations
If it’s solutions Trump wants, Lindholm believes they’re hiding in plain sight, in a big field of weedy regulations.
“If President Trump’s intent is to lower the price of beef or make it more attainable or affordable for folks across the U.S., I think that’s the stated goal of every cattle rancher, too,” Lindholm said. “The solution in that regard is not to import beef from South America and prop up the big packers even more, the solution is — there’s already legislation filed for it in both the US House and the US Senate, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie in the US House, sponsored by Senator Angus King in the Senate — it’s bipartisan legislation and all it does and all it says is within state confines states can regulate how they want beef to be sold.”
That would help by making it so “more than just the big four packers can retail (beef),” Lindholm added.
“(That) would be a stunning turn of events where Americans across the country have more access to beef, to locally raise more protein than ever before,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be finding ways to create more dependence on other countries.”
Driskill personally would like to see true country of origin labeling, because he believes American consumers would likely choose to support cattle ranchers, if they could figure out which beef is truly American.
“We beef people really believe that our consumers deserve to know where their beef comes from,” he said. “But the federal government’s not allowed us to have that happen.”
Trump has done some really great things for agriculture, Eisele added.
“The One Big Beautiful Bill is a great example of things that we needed to help bring young people in the business,” he said. “There’s tax breaks, there’s succession planning breaks, there’s investment breaks, all that is useful to young people.”
Time is also part of the cure, Magagna said.
“If the marketplace is working as marketplaces normally work, if the prices get too high and the purchasing declines, that forces the prices down,” he said.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
