Clopton Cattle Company

08/23/2026

In 1995 a gallon of diesel cost $1.37. A pound of ground beef cost $1.37.

Today diesel is $5.45. Ground beef is $6.88.

So yes, beef went up. Nobody is hiding from that. But look at what else did, and look at who set it.

Electricity: 9.4 cents a kilowatt hour in 1996, 19.7 cents in July of this year.

Regular gas: $1.11 in 1995, $4.05 now.

Property taxes: American homeowners paid $442 billion in 2010 and $797 billion in 2024. Up 30% between 2019 and 2024 alone, faster than wages and faster than inflation. The average single family tax bill is $4,427 a year.

Not one of those got a Friday morning announcement.

Beef did.

Yesterday, the President posted that the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign product for ground beef into the country with no out of quota tariff for the next 90 days, and that there is a commitment it will sell 25% below market. He called it a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families.

Let us do the arithmetic he did not do.

300,000 metric tons is 661 million pounds. Divide it across 350 million Americans and it comes to 1.9 pounds per person. Not per month. Total. That is roughly seven quarter pound patties per American spread across an entire 90 day window. About one hamburger every twelve days.

Now price the relief. If that beef truly lands 25% under a $6.88 market, the discount is $1.72 a pound. Multiply by 1.9 pounds and every American saves three dollars and twenty five cents. Over three months. Call it thirteen dollars a year if it never stopped, and it stops in 90 days.

Three dollars and twenty five cents.

Set that next to a $4,427 property tax bill. Set it next to what the power company took last month. Set it next to $39.89 trillion in national debt, which works out to $286,000 per American household. Three dollars and twenty five cents is the relief on offer, and the bill for it gets sent to the only people in the chain who actually raise the animal.

And here is the part that should end the argument. We already ran this experiment.

American beef imports are at an all time record. 1.7 billion pounds in the first quarter alone, up 15.3% from a year ago, with USDA projecting another record for the full year. Imported beef now makes up roughly 17% of the total US supply, about double what it was a few years back.

Brazil filled its quota in the first week of January and then kept right on shipping for the rest of the year at the full 26.4% out of quota tariff, and still finished the quarter as our number one supplier at 394 million pounds. Mexico is up 23%, partly because we closed the border to their feeder cattle so they packed the beef themselves instead. Argentina roughly doubled after February’s quota expansion and is still only 4.3% of what we bring in, while Brazil and Uruguay fell by nearly as much as Argentina gained.

That is the whole story. As Oklahoma State’s Derrell Peel put it, changing the quotas changes which country the beef comes from. It does not change how much comes in.

The out of quota tariff was never the thing holding the beef back. Buyers were paying it and importing anyway, at record volume, because they needed the product that badly. And ground beef went to $6.88 regardless, up 10.1% from a year ago.

You cannot fix a supply shortage by removing a tariff people were already paying. The beef is not sitting in a warehouse in Sydney waiting on a paperwork change. There is not enough of it in the world, because the cattle do not exist.

That is the part nobody wants to say out loud.

In 1980 the cattle producer got 63 cents of every retail beef dollar. By 2021 he/she got 37 cents, while the packer and retailer split the other 63. The spread between what the rancher was paid and what the consumer paid went from 88 cents a pound to $4.58 a pound. Retail beef climbed for thirty years and the man or woman who raised it got a smaller and smaller cut of it.

So when they say beef costs too much, look at what they are actually proposing to fix. Not the spread. Not the four packers who control 85% of processing. The rancher.

Meanwhile the herd is at 86.2 million head, the smallest since 1951. Beef cows at 27.6 million, lowest since 1961. The 2025 calf crop was the smallest since 1941. Beef cow slaughter is down 45% since 2022 and nonfed beef production has fallen 27%.

That is the bill coming due for drought, for input costs, for federal and state agencies squeezing ranchers off the public range one allotment at a time, and for twenty years of families doing the math and selling out.

And if you want to see policy at work, look at the range. The BLM authorized 18.2 million animal unit months of grazing in 1954. Today it runs around 8.6 million. Cut in half. Even now, the permits already on the books allow for roughly 12.3 million AUMs while only about 8.8 million get authorized, which means the forage exists on paper and the cattle are not allowed on it. The Forest Service went the same direction.

That is not weather. That is a decision, made in an office, renewed every single year.

Then the same government that took the grass turns around and says there is not enough beef.

A cow takes two years to make a calf and you cannot vote that number down.

Even NCBA said it plainly. Market interventions like this one throw cold water on herd expansion and trade long term stability for short term messaging.

Now ask the bigger question. Why did all of it go up at the same time?

Diesel, groceries, electricity, land, insurance, a set of tires, a bull. Different industries, different supply chains, different weather. They do not all move together by accident. When every price in the country rises at once, the thing that changed is not the goods. It is the money.

On August 15, 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. The dollar stopped being a claim on anything and became a promise. Since that day the dollar has lost roughly 86% of its purchasing power. A dollar your grandfather earned in 1971 buys about twelve cents worth of goods today.

Watch what happened after the leash came off.

National debt in 1971: $406 billion. National debt this month: $39.89 trillion. It grows about $16 billion a day. M2, the broad money supply, sits at an all time high of $22.67 trillion. In 1971 it was under $700 billion. And the interest alone on what we already owe runs about $1.1 trillion a year. Three billion dollars a day. Roughly fourteen cents of every federal dollar spent goes to servicing debt on things already bought and already forgotten.

Every appropriation gets sold as free. It is never free. Congress does not have the money, so Treasury issues the paper, and the purchasing power comes out of your wallet whether you voted for it or not. That is not a tax you can appeal. It shows up as a higher number at the pump and a higher number at the meat counter, and then the same people who authorized it stand at a podium and announce three dollars and twenty five cents of relief.

They created the fire and now they want to hold the rancher responsible for the smoke.

Shared from Cody Baker.

08/21/2026

First case in Sonora… and we’re gonna open the border?

Just days before the Douglas, Ariz., port of entry is set to welcome Mexican cattle, a confirmed bovine case in Sonora throws the USDA's phased reopening timeline into question.

07/19/2026

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.

07/15/2026

Happy Cow Appreciation Day! 🤠

07/11/2026

Someone is very very lost.
Either that or he thinks it’s gonna rain here… a lot… 🤣

07/04/2026

Poor little Exception doesn’t look too happy 😬… when a ranch pack mule has to go to town and pack candy in a parade. Probably humiliated by all his glitter & ribbons 🤣

We did add licorice to the long list of things he’ll eat!

06/19/2026

The Breach: Inside the Systemic Collapse That Brought Screwworm Back to the U.S.

The recent confirmation of New World Screwworm (NWS) cases across Texas counties has triggered immediate regulatory panic, disaster declarations, and intense public scrutiny. As agricultural authorities race to establish quarantine blocks and inspection checkpoints, a central question dominates industry forums: how did this happen?

A common misconception suggests that biosecurity agencies were caught off guard, blind to the parasite’s presence in Central America. The data reveals a far more troubling reality. The USDA, the Mexican government, and Central American authorities did not lose track of the screwworm. They watched it, cataloged it, and mapped its progress for over three years as it marched steadily north.

The current domestic outbreak is not a failure of surveillance, but a historic, systemic collapse where a relentless biological threat simply outpaced bureaucratic policy and modern entomological countermeasures.

The warning signs did not trickle in…they exploded. The current crisis began in early 2023 within the dense terrain of Panama’s Darién Gap. Historically, this region acted as a reliable “biological bottleneck”. The region is a narrow land bridge devoid of infrastructure. For decades, the joint Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm (COPEG) utilized this narrow geographic choke point as a natural fortress, saturating a 40-mile-wide barrier zone with sterile flies to systematically collapse any northernmost wave of the wild population.

But in 2023, the Darién Gap bottleneck broke, and cases jumped from a historic average of a mere 25 isolated incidents per year to more than 6,500 cases!

From that initial flashpoint, the parasite advanced north through Central America and into Mexico like a slow-moving wildfire. By the time the pest officially breached the United States border in June 2026, international monitoring programs had documented an astonishing toll…

-Over 185,000 confirmed livestock and domestic animal cases.
-More than 2,100 confirmed human infestations.

Agricultural officials knew exactly where the flies were, which corridors they were moving through, and how fast they were breeding. The breakdown occurred not in identifying the enemy, but in the ex*****on of the defense.

To understand why the international response appeared sluggish and ultimately ineffective, we have to look at the convergence of biological, logistical, and economic vulnerabilities that crippled the frontline defense.

For more than half a century, the gold standard of screwworm eradication has been the “Sterile Insect Technique (SIT)”. This process relies on breeding hundreds of millions of factory-reared male flies, sterilizing them via radiation, and releasing them into the wild to mate with wild females, effectively collapsing the population cycle.

During the height of the Central American surge, entomologists discovered a devastating genetic hitch…the factory-bred sterile males had drifted “behaviorally”, becoming significantly less attractive to wild females. So, the wild populations rejected the laboratory-raised male flies, continued to mate successfully among themselves, and rendered the primary biological weapon pretty much ineffective.

While an adult screwworm fly is a dynamic flier, capable of traveling 6 to 12 miles on its own or riding the wind for over 100 miles, it cannot cross continents in a single leap. To survive, a female fly must find a warm-blooded host to lay her eggs within her short 10-to-30-day lifespan. Left to their own wings, the flies would have starved in the host-sparse canopy of the Darién jungle. Instead, they bypassed the flight barrier entirely by hitching a ride.

Illicit wildlife and livestock smuggling, and cartel-controlled cattle movement through Central America accelerated the parasite's transit. Warm-blooded hosts carrying unobserved wounds were moved right through the biological barrier inside high-speed transit corridors. They bypassed formal agricultural quarantine checkpoints, dropping mature larvae into fresh soil thousands of miles ahead of established containment lines.

A June 2026 study published in the journal, Conservation Biology, by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), alongside agricultural economists and regional intelligence, outlines the undeniable "proof of transit" by cartels.

The most definitive proof comes from spatial tracking models. Entomologists know the maximum natural flight speed and dispersal patterns of a wild screwworm fly. When veterinarians mapped the outbreaks across Central America and into Mexico, the data showed the parasite was not moving at the biological speed of an insect flying from pasture to pasture.

Instead, the epidemic was jumping hundreds of miles overnight, perfectly mirroring known, long-monitored contraband smuggling routes that run from Nicaragua through Honduras and Guatemala into southern Mexico. The parasite was explicitly documented as "moving at the speed of trucks," indicating it was riding inside vehicles via high-speed transit corridors.

In Central America, the illegal cattle trade does not operate as a collection of independent rustlers. Instead, it is a sophisticated criminal economy integrated with drug trafficking and money laundering.

Cartels clear massive swathes of protected forests and indigenous territories in Central America to establish illegal ranches. Then they buy thousands of head of cattle using drug profits, graze them on these remote lands to claim territory, and then illicitly move an estimated 800,000 head of cattle annually northward.

These animals are eventually "laundered" into legitimate commercial beef supply chains in Mexico by using falsified ear tags and forged health papers.

Because these 800,000 animals completely bypass legal, official veterinary inspection stations, there is no one checking them for the open wounds, hide abrasions, or fresh brandings that attract egg-laying flies.

Conservationists using extensive networks of remote camera traps throughout the Maya Biosphere Reserve and the Five Great Forests of Central America caught these movements in real time.

The cameras, which were originally set up to track endangered jaguars, documented strings of uninspected cattle being herded through hidden jungle trails and then wild animals (like pumas and tapirs) suddenly displaying horrific, advanced screwworm lesions. The emergence of these wildlife hotspots occurred exactly where the illegal cattle routes intersected the deep forest.

As economists and biosecurity experts have noted, you can dump hundreds of millions of dollars into sterile fly releases, but the technical tools fail because the reinfestation pipeline remains wide open through these cartel-controlled contraband networks.

Stopping the NWS parasite requires an enormous volume of sterile flies to saturate the environment. Financial commitments were made…the previous US administration allocated $213 million in emergency funding in late 2023, and more funding was added through 2024 and 2025…but capital cannot instantly build biological infrastructure.

Constructing specialized, high-security sterile fly breeding facilities in Mexico and South Texas takes years. Factories simply couldn’t scale up quickly enough to meet the demand, lagging far behind the production target of 500 million flies per week necessary to suppress the migration corridor.

The strain reached a breaking point just as the threat neared the domestic border. Between 2025 and 2026, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) suffered a severe staffing contraction, losing roughly 23% of its personnel. This workforce reduction hit specialized field veterinarians and entomological technicians particularly hard…just the exact personnel required to manage frontline border traps, process samples, and run early-detection monitoring programs.

The rising animal case counts visible on official tracking dashboards are not the result of a sudden, unpredictable disaster. They are the predictable consequences of a multi-year, transcontinental containment line that was eroded piece by piece.

With the parasite now firmly established in US livestock populations, the strategy must pivot to aggressive, localized eradication. The enemy is no longer at the gates…it is in the pasture.

06/15/2026

Facts!! 🤣🤣🤣