While it doubles down on imports, the administration is also turning to the problem CPA identified in November in “Beef Prices: Blame the Packers, Not America’s Ranchers”: the structural chokepoint in this market is processing. Four firms (Tyson, Cargill, and Brazilian-owned JBS and National Beef) account for roughly 85% of the nation’s fed-cattle purchases, and the Justice Department has an open antitrust probe into the industry.
Pressed by rancher and radio host Glenn Beck, the President said lighter processing regulation “could be a very good call for ranchers or farmers — no, for the country”; two days later he posted that the Big Processors are “a nasty Monopoly… essentially, 4 of them, a very non competitive number,” and that he is authorizing legal documents to give ranchers “the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD”. Secretary Rollins answered within hours, promising announcements soon: waived processing red tape, expanded interstate sales, small-processor funding, and “fighting consolidation”.
The states got to this diagnosis first. New Hampshire has just four USDA-inspected slaughterhouses, with kill slots booked 18 to 24 months out. And when its legislature passed a bill this year letting farms process and sell small numbers of livestock locally, it was vetoed for one reason only: it collided with the federal Meat Inspection Act. When a state legislature is willing to challenge a 120-year-old federal statute just so ranchers can sell a steer to their neighbors, something is badly wrong with the market. And New Hampshire is the national story in miniature: the chokepoint is not simply how much capacity exists, but who controls it.
Easing the path for ranchers to process and sell their own cattle is therefore welcome, but it is a first step, not the endpoint. Most Americans buy beef through supermarkets, restaurants, and institutional foodservice. A rancher selling freezer beef to neighbors creates an alternative outlet. An independent processor able to supply grocery and foodservice customers creates an alternative buyer: another bidder for thousands of fed cattle. Only the second begins to challenge the four-firm structure nationally.
A note on the shape of the packer problem: it is structural, not a claim that the packers are earning windfall profits today. The major meatpackers have in fact been losing money on beef as the cattle shortage leaves plants underutilized. But concentration cuts both ways: these dominant buyers hold the leverage when cattle are plentiful, and closures by a handful of firms can eliminate major regional buyers when cattle are scarce, leaving even less competition when the herd finally rebuilds. That is exactly why the remedy cannot wait for the next turn in the cattle cycle.
The fix is more independent, inspected capacity, not less inspection — and relief from inspection costs is not relief from inspection. Rigor is not the problem; the bill is. Overtime and holiday inspection fees that a Tyson-scale plant spreads across millions of head are unsustainable for small local processors.
Lower unnecessary regulatory barriers for inspected local and regional processors. Expand interstate access through the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program, extended to Georgia in July. Build independent processors able to serve grocery and foodservice markets, using tools like the up-to-$500 million in support that pointedly excluded Tyson and JBS. And where concentration suppresses competition, use antitrust law against the four-firm structure itself: USDA’s own economists find recent evidence that reduced competition has lowered the prices cattle producers receive, and identify new entry and capacity expansion as ways to encourage renewed competition. Small-processor reform should complement, not substitute for, action against the Big Four meatpackers.
Why Beef Prices Are Still So High: More Imports Won’t Fix America’s Cattle Crisis
In one August week, Washington reopened the border to Mexican cattle, expanded low-tariff beef imports, and finally turned to the packers. Only one targets the real problem.
KEY POINTS
In June, CPA showed that America’s beef-price crisis is a domestic supply crisis: the U.S. cattle herd has fallen to 86.2 million head, the smallest in 75 years, and beef imports surged 86% since 2021 while retail prices still rose 56%. More imports were not solving the price problem then, and they are not solving it now. Two months later, Washington has doubled down anyway.
Import volumes have nearly tripled since 2010, and the retail price of ground beef has tripled right alongside them. Sixteen years of rising imports have plainly failed as a strategy for affordable beef: imports can fill part of the gap left by a shrinking herd, but they do not rebuild that herd, and repeated import interventions undermine the price signals needed to do so.
FIGURE 1:
The Import-First Strategy Escalates
In November, the administration dropped the 10% reciprocal tariff on Argentine beef, and in February it stacked 80,000 metric tons of in-quota Argentine lean-beef-trimmings access on top of Argentina’s existing 20,000-ton beef TRQ, quintupling its 2026 in-quota access to 100,000 metric tons . That reclassification is worth real money: the in-quota rate is 4.4 cents per kilogram (about 0.6% ad valorem) versus 26.4% above quota, a gap of more than $1.80 per kilogram, roughly 84 cents a pound, at current trimmings prices. That money accrues to the importers and foreign packers who no longer pay the higher tariff. Nothing requires them to pass it on to consumers, and the volume is too small to move average beef prices even if they did.
This policy change happened over the objection of 14 House Republicans, including Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, who warned the move would “undermine American cattle producers” and “reintroduce avoidable animal-health risks”. On August 21, the President went further, announcing that an additional 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings would enter at the lower in-quota tariff rate: three 100,000-ton tranches running September 1 through November 30, escaping the far higher above-quota tariff, promising it would be “sold at 25% below current market prices”. Three days later, USDA reopened the Douglas, Arizona port to live Mexican cattle, with phased reopenings in New Mexico to follow.
Notably, the deal is not being driven by the nation’s agriculture agency. Secretary Rollins told reporters on August 25 that the conversations were “still going on,” and that Ambassador Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, is finalizing the details. The trade office, not the agriculture department, is writing this livestock policy, and it shows: price optics and deal-making are beating biosecurity and the herd rebuild.
Imports Fail to Lower Beef Prices
Economists are nearly unanimous that none of this will meaningfully bring down the price of a hamburger. Mexican feeder cattle historically account for about 3% of U.S. supply, the reopening is gradual, and every animal must be individually inspected. The 300,000-metric-ton trimmings tranche (roughly 661 million pounds) amounts to about ten weeks of existing U.S. lean-beef imports, which already run 50 to 70 million pounds per week. Ground beef hit $6.89 per pound in July, up 57% from five years ago; the central cause is a domestic herd at its smallest since 1951. A cow produces one calf per year. Imports cannot produce cows.
FIGURE 2:
The monthly data since 2022 show the same failure: import volumes roughly double the pace of early 2022, while ground beef climbed from about $4.60 to $6.80 a pound. The binding constraint is the domestic herd, not import supply.
Prices have kept climbing even as imports set records. In the first half of 2026, the United States imported 1.04 million metric tons (2.3 billion pounds) of fresh, chilled, and frozen beef worth $8.5 billion, up 14% by volume and 30% by value from the first half of 2025, a year that itself set the full-year record at 1.75 million metric tons. On the current pace, 2026 imports will approach 2.1 million metric tons, roughly 19% above that record. And the imported beef is not even cheap: average unit values reached $8.16 per kilogram in the first half, up 14% year-over-year.
Secretary Rollins herself supplied the proof that imports will not bring down prices: Americans consume roughly 13 million metric tons of beef a year, 11 million of it domestic. No 90-day import window changes that ratio. As market analyst Don Close put it after futures recovered from the initial shock, traders concluded “just how poorly conceived the whole plan was”.
What Imports Will Do: Punish the Cattle Rebuild
What the announcements did move was the price paid to American ranchers. Live and feeder cattle futures dropped $3–$6 per hundredweight within hours on August 21. That is the transmission mechanism working exactly backwards: rebuilding an 86.2-million-head herd requires ranchers to hold back heifers (young females that become the next generation of breeding cows) from slaughter, a multi-year investment they will only make if they trust prices to hold. Every import shock teaches them the opposite lesson. NCBA called it “flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef” at the expense of long-term stability. This is part of how the country lost 456,536 cattle operations since 1997, including 17% between 2017 and 2022 alone: decades of policy that treated foreign supply as a substitute for domestic capacity, when in fact it was hollowing it out.
FIGURE 3:
The herd that American ranchers spent generations building has been worked back down to its 1951 level, and herds this small are not rebuilt inside a 90-day import window. They are rebuilt over years of retained heifers, and only when ranchers can bank on the price signal holding.
Biosecurity Risks: Screwworm and a Broken Inspection Backstop
Live cattle imports from Mexico were halted in May 2025 for a reason. The New World screwworm, a parasite that eats livestock alive and threatens the $113 billion U.S. cattle industry, has now been confirmed in more than 40 U.S. cases across southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, the first domestic detections since 1966. Mexico has recorded over 34,000 cases since the outbreak began, including 62 new cases within roughly 100 miles of the U.S. border in July, and sterile-fly production remains far below the ~500 million flies per week eradication requires. R-CALF USA has urged USDA to keep the border closed until Mexico eradicates the pest, warning that reopening invites trafficked Central American cattle to bypass biosecurity entirely.
Meanwhile, the boxed-beef surge is exposing weaknesses in the inspection backstop that is supposed to guarantee foreign meat meets U.S. standards. Earlier this month, FSIS issued a Class I recall (reserved for products with a “reasonable probability” of causing serious illness or death) for 29,628 pounds of raw Argentine beef distributed in Texas and Florida that entered the country without import reinspection at all. As FSIS itself explains, when reinspection is skipped, the product’s “wholesomeness, labeling compliance, and freedom from contamination are totally unknown.” Nor is failure to present imported beef for reinspection unprecedented: FSIS recalled more than 20,000 pounds of Uruguayan beef for the same violation in 2024, and Argentine shipments hit 38 million pounds in May, up roughly 190% year-over-year. Foreign approval does not eliminate foreign risk; the more Washington increases import dependence, the more U.S. consumers depend on production systems outside direct U.S. regulatory control, and the more important effective U.S. border oversight becomes.
The Right Target, At Last: The Packer Chokepoint
While it doubles down on imports, the administration is also turning to the problem CPA identified in November in “Beef Prices: Blame the Packers, Not America’s Ranchers”: the structural chokepoint in this market is processing. Four firms (Tyson, Cargill, and Brazilian-owned JBS and National Beef) account for roughly 85% of the nation’s fed-cattle purchases, and the Justice Department has an open antitrust probe into the industry.
Pressed by rancher and radio host Glenn Beck, the President said lighter processing regulation “could be a very good call for ranchers or farmers — no, for the country”; two days later he posted that the Big Processors are “a nasty Monopoly… essentially, 4 of them, a very non competitive number,” and that he is authorizing legal documents to give ranchers “the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD”. Secretary Rollins answered within hours, promising announcements soon: waived processing red tape, expanded interstate sales, small-processor funding, and “fighting consolidation”.
The states got to this diagnosis first. New Hampshire has just four USDA-inspected slaughterhouses, with kill slots booked 18 to 24 months out. And when its legislature passed a bill this year letting farms process and sell small numbers of livestock locally, it was vetoed for one reason only: it collided with the federal Meat Inspection Act. When a state legislature is willing to challenge a 120-year-old federal statute just so ranchers can sell a steer to their neighbors, something is badly wrong with the market. And New Hampshire is the national story in miniature: the chokepoint is not simply how much capacity exists, but who controls it.
Easing the path for ranchers to process and sell their own cattle is therefore welcome, but it is a first step, not the endpoint. Most Americans buy beef through supermarkets, restaurants, and institutional foodservice. A rancher selling freezer beef to neighbors creates an alternative outlet. An independent processor able to supply grocery and foodservice customers creates an alternative buyer: another bidder for thousands of fed cattle. Only the second begins to challenge the four-firm structure nationally.
A note on the shape of the packer problem: it is structural, not a claim that the packers are earning windfall profits today. The major meatpackers have in fact been losing money on beef as the cattle shortage leaves plants underutilized. But concentration cuts both ways: these dominant buyers hold the leverage when cattle are plentiful, and closures by a handful of firms can eliminate major regional buyers when cattle are scarce, leaving even less competition when the herd finally rebuilds. That is exactly why the remedy cannot wait for the next turn in the cattle cycle.
The fix is more independent, inspected capacity, not less inspection — and relief from inspection costs is not relief from inspection. Rigor is not the problem; the bill is. Overtime and holiday inspection fees that a Tyson-scale plant spreads across millions of head are unsustainable for small local processors.
Lower unnecessary regulatory barriers for inspected local and regional processors. Expand interstate access through the Cooperative Interstate Shipment program, extended to Georgia in July. Build independent processors able to serve grocery and foodservice markets, using tools like the up-to-$500 million in support that pointedly excluded Tyson and JBS. And where concentration suppresses competition, use antitrust law against the four-firm structure itself: USDA’s own economists find recent evidence that reduced competition has lowered the prices cattle producers receive, and identify new entry and capacity expansion as ways to encourage renewed competition. Small-processor reform should complement, not substitute for, action against the Big Four meatpackers.
The Bottom Line
The administration’s own Agriculture Secretary has stated the truth plainly: “Unless we rebuild our beef herd, we will become more and more reliant on foreign countries”. Yet the policy being finalized by the trade office does the reverse: it suppresses the price signals ranchers need to rebuild, imports animal-disease risk across a border that was closed for cause, and pushes volume through an inspection system already producing Class I recalls.
Beef prices are high because America’s cattle industry has been gutted. You cannot import your way out of that. The packer initiative is the first import-independent move in this saga, and the most promising, because it finally targets the right problem.
The Trump administration needs to follow the logic all the way through: build independent processing capacity able to compete for cattle at scale, back it where necessary with serious antitrust action, and put American ranchers and the domestic herd first. More imports will never fix the shrinking domestic cattle supply. Only a healthy and growing U.S. cattle industry will bring beef prices in line with consumer expectations.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
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