10/24/2025
Y'all wanna know why beef prices are so high and why our government isn't doing anything to actually fix it?
It's because we're letting Greta Thunberg's wacko thinking run our ranching and beef industry instead of some basic common sense.
Let me explain.
Last week I heard a politician said he was “working some magic” to address beef prices.
I cringed.
It reminded me of Ronald Reagan's famous quote: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help".
Several key factors impact beef and cattle prices, and folks should know there is a BIG distinction between cattle prices and the price of beef. That will become clear in a minute.
Government intervention is one of the biggest drivers of the rising price of food, and beef is no exception.
The government has for decades paid farmers and ranchers to remove land from ag production.
Obama and Biden took away from many ranchers their grazing permits that allowed cattle to graze on public lands.
So now we have this Argentinian Beef gimmick.
Simply buying more beef from Argentina will not “magically” fix the problem.
Whoever is in charge of Trade in the current administration has not fully considered the problem.
Importing Argentinian cows won't actually fix the problem.
Cattle disappeared by the millions after a drought.
At the same time Obama, then Biden pushed ranchers off of public lands.
Some leftist governors did the same because they told us the world was going to end in 10 years because cows pass gas.
This latest fix is just a band-aid for all these problems.
The amount of cattle Argentina can send to the U.S. makes a big difference to the Argentinian economy, but that same amount of imported product doesn't affect our markets so much.
On top of that, it's not even all that cheap to begin with.
Argentinian prices are in the range of $3.70 when they land in our ports, assuming there are no tariffs.
By the time the beef finally gets to American consumers, the impact for the end consumer will be negligible.
Not only that, the new product hitting the market will send a signal of chaos throughout the beef industry.
And as anyone who works with imported goods knows, the end consumers will likely not even notice all the wrangling that goes on behind the scenes before the product gets to the shelves.
You see, all those sides of cow still need to be fabricated into product the American consumer wants to buy. That production isn't free, and it isn't even all that cheap.
If you wanna increase the number of cows, we need to give grazing permits back to ranchers on both the federal and state acreage back that Obama and Biden systematically removed.
Allowing this could add millions of cows on those acres, which will both improve the soil, improve the grass base, aid wildlife populations numbers, bolster the entire environment, and help us to get the cow population and beef production back to where it needs to be for American consumers.
We can also pray for some rain in the plains.
But for goodness sake let's at LEAST stop creating incentives to take land out of cattle production.
Importing more foreign product will not fix anything. It might drop the price for a day or a week, or maybe just for next Tuesday, and maybe only in one localized area. But that's it. It certainly won't impact prices nationwide.
Also, it's worth noting that Argentina isn't going to redirect its high-value sales away from Japan and North Korea in order to sell ground beef in the U.S. They're going to keep selling to the markets that will pay the highest prices.
This Argentinian plan just is not very wise. It doesn't even make economic sense for Argentina!
If we're going to fix our food supply issues, we have to fix them at the ranching level here at home, and then let the rest play out.
When governments try to fix problems using investment tax credits in the later stages of the sales cycle, it doesn't fix the problem, it only alleviates the symptoms for a minute.
Government shouldn't be in the cow business.
Let's get government out of the cow business, and allow western ranchers to use the land surrounding their ranches for grazing.
And for heaven's sake, let's get rid of the environmental wackjob thinking like Greta Thunberg's that has our ranchers so hamstrung.
That should be the FIRST thing we do.
