08/24/2026
Our country will be bringing in a bunch of foreign beef to bring down the cost to the consumer. I might be an uneducated guy in the middle of nowhere, but here’s how I see it:
The price of beef is HIGH. We all see it. People are hurting trying to buy some beef for dinner. The other side of this is that all of the inputs to raise the beef are also HIGH (hello $5+ per gallon diesel and everything that impacts).
The proponents of bringing in 100’s of thousands of tons of foreign beef argue it will help bring down the retail cost of beef in the short term. Supply and demand principles are pretty simple. They also argue that since the live weight prices will also come back down, that will incentivize farmers and ranchers to keep their heifers to grow their herd. After all, it makes much less sense to sell at $3.30 per lb than it would if it’s $5 per lb.
What this thinking totally overlooks is that when prices artificially come down because of a flood of foreign beef, it won’t make the inputs any less expensive-it just makes what we sell for much less. It’s hard to hold back cattle for growth when you can’t afford to keep them. That leaves a lot of cattle owners in a huge pickle; do we sell for much less but at least bring some money in OR keep more than needed for replacement and potentially go further into debt to feed them, graze them, etc. and hope it’s better in the future?
These are decisions that can bankrupt family farms and ranches. We’re seeing it every single day. Just like almost every other industry in our country nowadays, we are outsourcing instead of solving the core problem which is our cattle herds are at catastrophically low levels and rather than incentivizing growth, we just bring in some foreign slop and tell people to plug their nose and eat it.
What may be even more concerning is that we don’t even know which country this mystery meat is coming from. We won’t know anything outside of the fact it may or may not resemble real beef.
We should all be voting with our dollars. It’s the ONLY thing that those in power actually care about. Buy from someone you trust. How this isn’t viewed as a national security threat is beyond me.
