Broken Pines Farm

08/30/2026

New product alert: sandwich steaks $8.50/lb

Tired of paying crazy prices at sub shops for a tiny cheesesteak made from over processed beef?
Our new sandwich steaks are real beef thinly sliced perfect for a sub or sandwich.

Contact us to order your's today!

08/29/2026

Eleven plants processed 47 percent of every head of cattle killed in America last year.

The whole picture, in numbers you can check.

American plants killed and processed 29.25 million cattle in 2025. Eleven of them, each with capacity above a million head a year, took 13.834 million of those animals between them. That is 47.3 percent of the national kill.

There are 937 federally inspected plants in the country. The 888 smallest of them, every operation running under 100,000 head a year, handled around 1.92 million cattle combined. That works out to just 7.14 percent, and it is the whole small-plant sector put together.

Your local locker is likely in that 7 percent figure.

The concentration has not always been like this. Four companies now control roughly 85 percent of beef processing. In 1980 the same top four held 36 percent, so this happened inside one career.

Small plants are actually gaining ground, slowly. Their share was 3.9 percent in 2007 and is 7.1 percent now, and the total plant count has climbed back to 937 after bottoming out at 626 in 2007, according to USDA slaughter data compiled by Drovers.

The herd underneath all of it is the thinnest it has been in three quarters of a century. Producers had 86.2 million head on January 1, the lowest count since 1951, while live cattle prices ran up 37 percent between June 2024 and this past May.

Running alongside that, the administration opened the tariff-free door to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef trimmings over 90 days, and R-CALF's Bill Bullard responded by demanding mandatory country-of-origin labeling so buyers can at least tell the difference at the case.

Record prices and a record-thin herd at the same time as record imports. Tell me which number on this list you would fix first if Monday's announcement could only fix one, and why that one.

Sources: USDA, Drovers, Cattle Range, NPR, Oklahoma Farm Report, Beef Magazine

08/27/2026

Did you know organic does not mean chemical free?

I think more people need to understand that the word Pesticide does not automatically = Danger, Cancer.

08/25/2026

20-30% of beef is imported and even the mom and pop stores and some butchers buy boxed meats from the big 4 so it may be foreign. You probably never noticed but meat does not have a label like your produce. Mandatory country of origin labeling (mcool) means buying direct from the farm is the only way to know where it comes from.

08/24/2026

08/22/2026

A pound of potato chips and a pound of ground beef are now 33 cents apart.

Beef is the more expensive one. In July, ground beef averaged $6.89 a pound. Potato chips came in at $6.56 for 16 ounces.

Look at what each one takes. Chips are potatoes, oil and salt, from a crop planted and harvested inside a single season. Your pound of ground beef starts with a cow bred one year, a calf born the next, then roughly two years of grass, feed, water and labor before any of it reaches a store.

Thirty-three cents.

None of that makes beef cheap. Beef rose about 9 percent over the past year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, faster than most of the grocery store, and the national cattle herd is the smallest it has been since 1951.

It is just a number worth keeping in your head the next time somebody says beef is the thing that got expensive.

Go check the chips in your kitchen. Divide the price by the ounces, multiply by 16, and tell us what your bag actually works out to per pound.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis