Fox 21 – How you can bypass spending big bucks for beef in SOCO
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(COLORADO SPRINGS) — Labor Day Weekend is just around the corner, so you might be thinking about getting ready to fire up the grill to enjoy some hamburgers before the summer ends. However, meat providers in Southern Colorado say record low herd numbers continue to drive beef prices up.
The graph below came straight from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website. It shows how the average price for ground chuck, or 100% beef, has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025.
“Buying local could be saving you some money now for sure, and it keeps more, more dollars in the local community, number one, and gives you a chance to talk to your producer and enjoy that relationship as well,” said Luke Larson, Owner of Centennial Cuts.
Mike Callicrate, Owner of Ranch Foods Direct added, “Honestly, our prices just haven’t moved much. We have our own supply chain, we own our own livestock, and so we’re somewhat insulated from this market.”
Centennial Cuts and Ranch Foods Direct both know the benefits of only selling meat they’ve raised.
“Ours is good ground beef. It doesn’t have the additives in it like the anhydrous ammonia. It doesn’t have a thousand cattle represented in a pound of ground beef. It’s such high quality, it’s delicious,” said Callicrate.
Both pride themselves in serving up humane, pasture-to-plate protein. However, Centennial Cuts attributes low herd numbers to natural ups and downs in the industry, while Ranch Foods Direct says it’s a much larger and systemic issue.
“We’ve ended up with a handful of very highly concentrated meat packers, big feedlots, big retailers, big food service companies, and they have literally driven the ranchers out of business, forcing herd liquidation… This is why we’ve got so few animals today, and why the prices for cattle have gone up so much,” said Callicrate.
On the other hand, Centennial Cuts says it all comes down to the same issues like droughts, the economy, and more.
“We’ll have peaks and valleys and we’re just in a valley right now… and definitely as these prices are higher, the best cure for higher prices is high prices,” said Larson, “and so we will motivate producers to increase cow herds to the extent that rain and and pasture conditions will allow, so it will correct itself.”
Ranch Foods Direct disagrees, saying big businesses and monopolies cut prices and corners, which in turn raised prices across the board once smaller businesses had to close.
“In this last administration, Lina Khan [former chair of the Federal Trade Commission] was doing a great job of breaking up this concentrated power. She went after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, a lot of the big corporate interests. She blocked the Kroger-Albertsons merger, that was so important, and then when Trump came in, they fired her,” said Callicrate.
Ranch Foods Direct says it will take government solutions and law enforcement to solve the problem.
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