What’s Costing Cattlemen Millions is Saving Consumers Pennies
Posted on September 14, 2026 by Mike Callicrate
The destruction of the largest sector of American agriculture is happening now.
The retail beef price dropped two percent from the July report to $10.23/pound in August, down from $10.49/ pound, while finished cattle prices dropped 15%, from $255/cwt. (per 100 pounds) to $217/cwt. (The average consumer retail beef price for the month was reported on September 11th. USDA publishes monthly reports of meat price spreads from retailer scanner data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
While consumers may have saved 14 cents on a pound of ground beef, the struggling producer who invests in land, equipment, management, labor, and three years, has lost $589 per head (38 cents x 1,550 pounds average slaughter weight). Feeder cattle and calves have suffered losses so far of around $500 per head. The live cattle prices are actual sales reported by a cattle feeder selling to Tyson. (USDA is incapable of reporting accurate live cattle prices due to confidentiality rules in the Mandatory Price Reporting law. Congress passed Mandatory Price Reporting (MPR) to create more transparency and market competition, but the big meatpackers reversed the intent in rulemaking with a confidentiality provision that hides preferential pricing and sweetheart deals with the biggest feedlots.)
Adding to the destructive financial pressures, as meat plants close, it is the cattle producers who are forced to pay additional freight costs to more distant plants, amounting to over $100 per head for some cattle feeders. This is like the1998 eight-cent hog debacle – limit hook space, create bottlenecks, causing cash market collapse, and exploding meatpacker/retailer/food service company profits.
“Make Brazil Great Again” – Cattle markets crash as Trump Administration allows tariff free
South American beef imports into the highest and best consuming market in the world.
The administration’s destructive import policies and refusal to accept the disconnect between the cattle market and retail beef prices, along with an unwillingness to enforce antitrust laws, most importantly the Packers and Stockyards Act, has cattlemen meeting their 1998 hog moment. As the big pork packers limited hook space, hog prices dropped to eight cents per pound from around $52.90/cwt. in 1997, while retail pork prices went up from $2.59/lb. to $2.61/lb.
As the big pork packers limited hook space, hog prices dropped to eight cents per pound from around $52.90/cwt. in 1997, while retail pork prices went up from $2.59/lb. to $2.61/lb.
Immediately following the 1998 debacle, around 50,000 of our hog farmers went out of business, replaced with a new highly concentrated vertically integrated corporate controlled model like poultry – a modern-day model of serfdom. The same fate is awaiting cattle producers today. Once thought impossible for cattle production, this highly concentrated and confined model of meat production is showing up as Beef on Dairy. Newborn bull calves, considered a byproduct of the dairy industry, are now taken from the cow, never to see a pasture or blade of green grass, and fed to finish, replicating the extractive and fully controlled hog and poultry model.
Do we really want to lose more of the ranches and farms that feed us, the same people who care for our land, livestock, and wildlife? Since the1980s we’ve lost over half our ranchers. Nearly 10 million cows have left the land, replaced with imported cattle and beef, as valuable forage goes to waste, much of it burning, and already impoverished rural communities continue their decline.
The irreparable harm caused by this administration can’t be fixed overnight. We can’t snap our fingers and put people back on the land or rebuild rural America. We can’t rebuild lost processing infrastructure without breaking up the food cartel that has decimated our livestock industries. New entrants have little to no chance of success, and existing small slaughter operations will continue to fail without fair, open, and competitive markets.
There is much to do in recovering our lost food security. The administration should begin with putting American farmers, ranchers, processors, and consumers first, rather than importing $2.4 billion worth of stranded and suspect mystery meat from Trump family friends, including JBS’s criminal Batista family.