The Beef Crisis: Why Imports Aren't Lowering Prices

Americans are paying more for beef than ever before, but the reasons extend far beyond temporary inflation or seasonal shortages. According to Bill Bullard, CEO of R-CALF USA, today’s record prices are the culmination of more than forty years of policy decisions that steadily weakened America’s cattle industry.

This week on The Big 3 with senior economists Mihir Torsekar and Andrew Rechenberg, the discussion begins with the historic decline in the U.S. cattle herd, now the smallest in roughly seventy-five years. Bullard argues this contraction did not happen overnight. Instead, decades of consolidation among meatpackers, declining competition, and steadily increasing imports have hollowed out the domestic cattle industry. The result is fewer ranchers, fewer feedlots, fewer processing plants, and ultimately fewer cattle available to meet growing consumer demand.

The team also challenge the common assumption that high grocery prices mean ranchers are enjoying record profits. Ranching remains an asset-intensive business with significant land, feed, fuel, and labor costs. Because cattle require nearly three years from breeding to market, producers cannot quickly respond to changing prices. Many ranchers still operate on narrow margins despite higher cattle prices, while retailers have captured a growing share of profits throughout the supply chain.

Another major theme is the misconception that imports solve food inflation. Despite beef imports increasing dramatically over recent years, retail beef prices have continued climbing. Bullard argues imports simply displace domestic production without creating new American ranchers, new cattle, or new processing capacity. Instead, he contends that long-term affordability depends on rebuilding the domestic herd and giving producers confidence that future investments will not be undercut by policy changes or import surges.

The conversation also explores broader structural issues affecting the industry, including concentrated meatpacking, country-of-origin labeling, enforcement of antitrust laws, and tariff-rate quotas. Bullard argues that restoring competition throughout the supply chain is essential if producers are to expand herds and consumers are to benefit from more stable prices.

Finally, the discussion turns to Brazil and the ongoing Section 301 investigation into illegal deforestation. Bullard explains why R-CALF believes Brazilian beef should not receive an exemption from potential tariffs, arguing that beef exports are directly connected to the deforestation practices under investigation. Exempting beef, he says, would undermine both environmental objectives and American cattle producers.

The episode concludes with a broader message: rebuilding America’s cattle industry is not simply about lowering grocery bills. It is about restoring rural communities, strengthening national food security, and ensuring that future generations of independent ranchers have the confidence to invest in expanding domestic production.



CHAPTERS:

00:00 - Why Beef Prices Are So High
00:41 - America's Beef Crisis Explained
01:51 - Bill Bullard Joins The Big Three
02:40 - Why the U.S. Cattle Herd Is Shrinking
13:21 - Why Ranchers Still Struggle
21:26 - Rebuilding America's Beef Industry
24:31 - Brazilian Beef & Section 301 Tariffs
29:30 - The Path to Affordable Beef

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:15

This 4th of July, a hamburger cost Americans more than ever. Ground beef prices are up 22% just from last year. The reason for these high prices goes back decades and is the result of a cattle industry that's been hollowed out for decades. Washington's answer, as usual, has been more imports, with the Trump administration quadrupling the quota for beef imports from Argentina in February. But that answer has been failing for years. U.S. beef imports volume is up 86% since 2021. Over that same stretch, beef prices also rose by 56%. If more imports were going to save the American cookout, they'd have done it by now. The real problem is that America has too few cattle, too few ranchers, too few places to process what cattle we do have, and too little policy certainty to fix any of it. Today on the Big Three, we're joined by Bill Bullard, CEO of RCAF USA, to talk about why beef prices are so high, why imports haven't fixed it, and what would it actually take to rebuild America's cattle industry. Welcome to the Big Three from the Coalition for a Prosperous America, where each week we break down the three biggest stories shaping U.S. trade, industrial policy, and the American economy. I'm Andrew Reschenberg, alongside my fellow senior economist Vahir Torsacar. Let's get to it. Today we're joined by Bill Bullard, CEO of RCAF USA. And RCAF is a national producer-only trade association representing roughly 4,000 U.S. cattle farmers, ranchers, and sheep producers across 42 states. Bill just submitted RCAF's official comments to the USTR on Section 301 investigation into Brazil, arguing that if the administration tariffs Brazil goods over illegal deforestation, Brazil shouldn't get a free pass. Bill, welcome to the big three. It's great to have you on to discuss the issues because you're the actual one on the ground actually living these issues day to day in the cattle industry. I wanted to start off by just giving you a chance to introduce yourself, tell us a bit about RCAF and the ranchers you represent.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Yes, I'm Bill Bullard with RCAF USA. I'm the CEO, have been for 25 years now. I'm a former cow calf rancher from South Dakota, now full-time uh running this organization on behalf of the 4,000 members. So our members are independent family farmers and ranchers who raise and sell cattles. We don't represent any other segment of the beef supply chain. Our uh single concern is to ensure the uh profitability and viability of our nation's independent cattle producers and sheep producers as well. But we have been losing both at an alarming rate now for the past several decades. So our uh mission is to reverse the ongoing contraction of our cattle and sheep industries.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

Thanks, Bill. Yeah, and so for the first segment, I wanted to really dive into what's the root cause by behind why Americans are paying more for beef than they ever have before. And more imports, as we stated earlier, aren't really helping. Prices are rising in tandem with the import surge. And so it's clear that this problem runs a bit deeper. And I think this all really points back to what you're saying is that this is really tied to our domestic cattle supply. US cattle herd is down to 86.2 million head, the smallest in 75 years. And so I wanted to give you a chance to explain how did we get to this point and where exactly is the price pressure coming from for in the beef industry and is it tied to this record low herd size?

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yeah, so um, and that's very important. The the tike cattle supplies we're experiencing today, the lowest level in 75 years did not happen overnight. We have been systematically reducing the number of cattle in our U.S. cattle herd for the past 40 years. Uh, we have uh destroyed the domestic infrastructure, competitive infrastructure for our cattle industry. And we did that going back 40 years ago, and we decided we were not, as a nation, going to uh aggressively enforce our antitrust laws. And so bigger was viewed as better, and the large corporations uh were able to take over the cattle industry. We have four major meat packers controlling approximately 85% of the Fed cattle market in the United States, unprecedented level of control. And with that control, uh you have these meat packers exerting abuse of buying power in the marketplace, enabling them to buy cattle for less than their market value, and actually to charge consumers an inflated price for beef. And this has been going on for decades, and in conjunction with this, we had an open door policy. We have invited imports from around the world to come into the domestic market. It's undifferentiated. Consumers cannot tell what product in the grocery store is a domestic product versus an imported product, and yet the importers were allowed to displace our domestic production and eliminate opportunities for our herd to expand. So our cattle herd size has been reduced by about 9.5 million head over the past 40 years. And it wasn't a recent anomaly. This has been going on for a long time. But while we when we lost the 9.5 million cows, we had lost over half of all our all of our cattle operations in the U.S. uh back in 1980, we had over a million uh beef cattle operations dispersed all across the United States. Today we're down to 620,000. So we've lost 52% of our cattle producers from the industry. And then we've begun to lose our intermediary markets, and those are the feedlots that feed the cattle at the last couple months of their lifespan, and they add weight and they add uh marbling, which makes the U.S. beef paste uh phenomenal. And so we've lost 86,000 feedlots during this period. So we have been dismantling the competitive infrastructure, and by that I mean the number of participants, the size of a factory, in our case it's the mother cows, and the number of our marketing outlets. And as our industry shrank, the the live cattle domestic supply chain shrank, we began to lose the meat packers. Since 2013, the largest meatpackers began closing meatpacking plants. And this has created uh helped to create scarcity. It helped to provide them with greater market power because they could balance uh the available supply of cattle uh with the demand that they represent. And uh very recently we've heard that two more of the major beep packers are closing plants in 2026. So we're losing plant capacity, and meanwhile, we've been growing our dependency on these undifferentiated imports, and they have become a much larger source of America's beef supply is now originating uh from foreign soil. This beef, of course, is not produced under the United States, strict production and food safety uh requirements, and uh and yet it's able to be brought into this market, displace domestic production, eliminate opportunities, uh which is resulting in the ongoing contraction of the industry. And so one of your questions was well, was how do we reverse this? Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to get a handle on the imports that have actually caused uh our industry to shrink. And obviously, increasing imports now uh is absolutely the wrong um methodology or strategy for correcting this problem. What we need to do is begin managing imports. We need to provide our domestic um producers the space it needs to make the investment, to expand, and and then it needs the confidence that national policy is not going to undercut them after they've made the investment, as national policy has for the past several decades. So as producers invest to expand the herd, it takes three years because of the long biological cycle of cattle. They need assurance that in three years' time, when new beef does begin arriving at the grocery stores, that their prices will not be undercut by a surge in imports from Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, or any one of the 20 countries we import from.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Yeah, Bill, you you touched on something I want to pull out a little bit more and explore here. Because in a lot of a lot of industries, when there's a supply problem, it's it's common to the for the problem to kind of be resolved in a few months, maybe because prices go up, producers make more, and prices come back down. But of course, as you mentioned, cattle don't perform that way, all right? We can and if maybe you can walk us through why. So, like when a rancher decides today, uh, amid a chronic sort shortage to expand the herd, how long can we expect before that shows up as more beef at the store? Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

So that's unique about the cattle industry. Uh, our industry has the longest biological cycle of any farmed animal. Takes approximately approximately three years from the time a decision is made to begin expanding the herd, and that would entail holding back uh female calves, raising them until they are old enough to breed, breeding them. They have the same gestation as a human. Takes nine months uh for a calf to be actually born. And once born, it takes between 15 to 24 months to raise that animal uh to an optimal slaughtering weight to be converted into beef. So you're looking at a three-year lag. So our industry is insensitive to changes in supplies. It's because we cannot respond quickly uh to changes in uh in the demand for our product. And uh and that makes uh our industry unique and it creates a unique challenge for our industry and makes us our industry highly vulnerable to market manipulation by uh concentrated meat packers, as well as highly sensitive to increased volumes of imports that have the effect of cutting undercutting domestic prices.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Yeah, and I wanted to follow up on that point too, just to kind of explain to the viewer some of the decisions, the tough decisions that ranchers have to make in this market. That, for example, you said that in order to increase the beef supply in the long run, you have to keep more young female cattle to raise and breed them. But the more female cattle you keep for breeding, the less actual meat supply you have in the short term as well. Is that right? And so these are the kind of decisions that ranchers have to make.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Absolutely correct. And and our producers went through this same situation here just a decade ago. Back in 2014, at that time, we had the highest nominal prices for cattle in history. Beef prices were also the highest nominal beef prices in history. And because of that long biological cycle, all of the analysts predicted that the cattle prices would remain strong for another three years and beef prices would remain elevated. But um cattle prices inexplicably collapsed the very next year in 2015, and they fell further and faster than any time in history. So the herd tried to expand in 2014. The investment was made to expand, but those who made that investment uh suffered significant losses because of the inexplicable price collapse that occurred thereafter. And then we went through a multi-year period from 2016 to 2022, where we saw cattle prices actually uh trending downward while at the same time beef prices were trending sharply upward. So, in an industry where the only ingredient in beef is cattle, you would expect there to be this synchronous, harmonious relationship between cattle prices and beef prices. But that was severed in 2016, and that it was a clear indication of classical uh market failure, where you have beef prices rising and cattle prices falling. And it was only until recently, uh around 2022, where we suffered a widespread drought that accelerated the ongoing decline of the herd size that supplies became incredibly tight and beef demand remained incredibly strong. And so at that time, the cattle prices that had been suppressed due to uh abusive market conduct on the part of the packers and increased uh volumes of imports, uh, they suddenly broke free from those constraints and began to chase the beef prices upward. And that's what we're seeing today, is now again, we're seeing the highest nominal prices in history for the price of cattle, and consumers are paying the highest nominal prices in history for the beef they purchased at the grocery store. So the market is fundamentally broken, and uh, and we have to uh reverse the ongoing contraction because if not, if we continue our dependency on this cheaper, lower quality imported product, um, what we will do is threaten our national security, which is already threatened because even today uh we rely 22% of the beef consumed in America is from foreign sources. And that has doubled, uh more than doubled over the past four years. So we are fast becoming uh dependent on foreign sources for what's arguably the most important dietary protein in the US, uh in the United States, and that of course is beef.

SPEAKER_03 13:35

And I think this is a great segment to our second segment of the podcast and really diving into the economics of the beef industry and explaining why ranchers are still struggling even with these high beef prices, because I think there's this common misconception amongst a lot of people out there that just because beef prices are high, that means ranchers are all getting rich and they have room to expand. There's all this money flowing into the industry. But I think that they don't realize a lot how ranching and farming in general is a really asset-heavy, cash-thin business. And the high prices don't necessarily trickle down to the ranchers if you're able to support less and less cattle by volume every single year. And the USDA even reported that 71% of farms and ranches ran below a 10% margin in 2024. And so this is really tight business for a lot of ranchers, and it's resulting in, as we talked about before, a lot of closing. There's been about 17% decline in ranches in the US in the past five years. And so this is really showing that ranchers are not benefiting in this market. They're actually struggling. A lot of ranches are closing. And so I really wanted to dive into and let you explain why these high beef price prices don't automatically mean a healthy ranching sector and why ranchers aren't necessarily getting rich just because prices are high at the grocery store.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Yeah, and that's a good question. And the the answer is that we have seen tremendous volatility even with these higher prices. And because of this long biological cycle, you have various segments within the live cattle industry. You have those producers who are raising a calf from the mother cows that they maintain year-round, and they'll keep that calf for six months and then sell it on to the next segment. So the next segment that is buying these calves to further raise them to bring them closer to slaughter weight, uh, they are paying record high prices for these calves. And then when they sell them to the third segment, which is the feedlot segment that finishes the cattle on a high concentrated diet, uh, that segment too is paying record prices for these cattle. And then when you have volatility between where the feedlot sells directly to the packer, uh, you have many feedlots that go out of business because they they can't make the margins. Uh, they've paid high prices for calves, and then suddenly there's uh a downturn in the cattle prices, and they end up going out of business. That's how we've lost 86,000 feedlots, particularly the small farmer feeders, the family-scale feeders that used to be scattered all across the United States. Uh they drop like flies. And so we've got uh higher cattle prices, but our input costs are significantly increased as well. High fuel costs, land costs. Uh it takes a tremendous capital investment uh to maintain a ranching operation. And uh and when the industry, as I indicated earlier, we went through about eight years of depressed prices. So these higher prices are enabling some of those producers to recover some of the losses that they'd experienced over a multi-year period. Um, but the latest census data shows us exactly what's happening, and this is just from 2017 to 2022. We've lost 106,000 uh independent beef cattle operations out of our industry just during that five-year period. So you're absolutely right. Uh, even with these higher prices, uh cattle producers are still operating on relatively small margins. And I say relatively because right now they're larger, but they have been uh actually uh less than the cost of production, has been the their marketing experience. And so um they are recovering to some extent, but very importantly, those who are realizing these higher prices today are doing so because half of their fellow cattle producers have been forced out of business. And there again leads us to this extremely tight supply situation. As a nation, we have simply neglected and ignored uh the need to ensure that our independent cattle producers had competitive markets in which to sell their cattle, and consumers deserved but uh did not receive uh assurance that they would have a competitive market with which to purchase their beef. And what we're seeing today, and what we've seen over the past 10 years, is the retailer margin has increased considerably, uh, meaning from the difference between what they buy the beef for from the packer to what they sell the beef for to the consumer, that margin has increased considerably. And during that same time period, the past 10 years, we've seen the packer margin actually decrease. And that their margin, of course, is what they pay the cattle producer versus what they can sell to the retailer. So what we're seeing in the industry right now is that the retailers are capturing the greatest margin and have been for several years. The packer margin has been squeezed, and the producer uh who is temporarily receiving, again, these highest novel prices in history, uh, their share has been buoyed up because of this tremendous imbalance between supply and demand. And so we are in a very precarious position, and we have been encouraging the administration to begin looking far deeper into the conduct of the retailers in the marketplace, because like the Packers, where they said forum controlled 85%, you've got just a handful of uh retailers that are controlling the lion's share of the market as well. And uh, we believe that there is a an excessive amount of abusive market power being exerted by the retailers in order to capture greater margins at the expense of producers on one end of the supply chain and consumers on the other.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

So, you know, Bill, you mentioned some of the factors that are contributing to this current situation. So, you know, if you think about it, like we've got on top of a 75-year low herd, ranchers are getting hit by it looks like three things at once like a drought across most of the cow herd, the screw worm incidents were that are shutting down cattle coming from Mexico, and a handful of packers, you know, controlling almost the whole market. So are is it the issue that they're all landing at once on the ground, or is one of them, one of these factors kind of doing more damage? Um, what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Well, the the damage uh has been systemic. And again, it it originated some 40 years ago when we uh jumped headlong into globalization and decided that we would no longer regulate uh the um multinational wee packers that were dominating the marketplace, and we would allow them to exercise market power with impunity. That was the problem. Now, uh that's been a chronic problem for decades. Suddenly it's become acute. It became acute uh as a result of those very factors you just mentioned. Drought accelerated the ongoing decline in the size of the cattle herd. The New World screw worm, which caused the U.S. to close the border to Mexico, uh, highlighted the vulnerability the U.S. had on reliance upon imported cattle from Mexico, because no longer were those cattle uh allowed into the United States as a result. That exacerbated the tight supply situation. And uh and the third factor, you had drought, screw worm, and well, what am I missing?

SPEAKER_02 20:56

So I think I said uh drought, screw worm, and uh the the concentration of the packers continue.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

And the concentration of the packers, yes. So so these have now coalesced uh to create um a disastrous situation for the industry where producers are struggling to maintain their operations and consumers, as Andrew said, are paying uh record prices at the grocery store. This need not occur in a competitive market. If the market were competitive, uh there would be sufficient um profits generated within every segment of the supply chain to keep everyone whole. Uh, but that has not occurred, and and now we're in this uh uh uh acutely dysfunctional marketplace.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

And for the final segment, I wanted to pivot a little bit to what the government needs to do to or what the government needs to stop doing, really, in order to rebuild our domestic cattle industry, because it's clear that this problem isn't going away on its own. Even at the current prices, Americans are eating more beef than ever. Annual per capita beef ex uh consumption in the US hit 59.3 pounds in 2025, the highest in 15 years. And so there's more demand than ever for beef, but the cattle industry still has these problems. So, Bill, I wanted to ask you what are the first steps or maybe the major steps that the government needs to take in order to address these supply and processing problems in the beef industry and ultimately get cattle up and prices down?

SPEAKER_01 22:23

So the answer is uh we need to restore competition. And the government can do that by requiring meat packers to begin labeling all beef as to where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered with a mandatory country of origin label. This would empower consumers to decide where they wanted their beef produced. And with those decisions, they could incentivize the expansion of the domestic herd. So that's step one. Step two is the government has got to begin enforcing our antitrust laws to protect these widely dispersed independent cattle producers from the abuse of market power emanating from the highly concentrated meat packers. And they need to enforce the what is called the Packers and Stockyards Act that was passed over a hundred years ago in recognition of the fact that antitrust laws were not sufficient in order to provide necessary protections to independent producers. So the Packers of Stockyards Act regulated the conduct, uh the competitive conduct of the meatpackers and prohibited them, for example, from engaging in deceptive and unduly discriminatory uh practices in the marketplace. And so enforcement of the antitrust laws, enforcement of the Packers of Stockyards Act, mandatory country of origin labeling, and then we need to begin managing these imports. And uh we need to re-establish tariff rate quotas to put a uh a limit on the volume of imports that are allowed into the United States, and we need to establish tariffs in order to offset the artificial advantage that importing or exporting countries have in our domestic market due to their weaker currency valuations, their weaker production standards, for example, their lower wage costs. We need to level the playing field for our domestic producers. So, with respect to managing trade, we need tariffs to offset the artificial advantage these other countries uh are enjoying. And we need to set limits in order to ensure that we provide our domestic industry the space it needs in order to uh re-begin rebuilding the herd. And of course, the goal will be to achieve self-reliance and beef production, because that is in our national security interest uh to be able to be self-sufficient in the production of this vitally important protein source.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

So, Bill, you you all just filed um RCA, you just filed RCAF's comments with USTR on the Section 301 case against Brazil. And just uh to step back for the audience, for anyone who hasn't followed it, like this is the investigation tied to Brazil's um illegal deforestation. And, you know, Bill, your filing argues that if we're going to tariff Brazilian goods, beef can't get a carve out. So walk us through your argument. Why is beef central to this case, and what happens to your ranchers if beef gets exempted?

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Right. So um the USTR's investigation revealed a direct nexus between illegal cattle ranching in Brazil and illegal deforestation in Brazil. In other words, uh, Brazil had failed to protect the forests uh from the degradation of uh encroachment of uh tearing the forest down in order to create pasture in order to raise cattle. The cattle are then laundered through um legitimate packing plants in Brazil, this according to the investigation, and then they are exported to the United States. So the effect of that is that Brazil is monetizing its deforestation through beef exports to the United States. So we argued that uh because the USDR found uh that Brazil's deforestation activities were actionable, uh the export of beef is the direct is directly responsible for that actionable conduct. And as a result, uh the USDR must include beef uh under the tariff regime that they're proposing, a 25% tariff on all Brazilian goods. And so by a lift, if we were to exempt beef as was originally proposed by USDR, it would completely undermine the agency's ability to uh to have any leverage over Brazil in order to address the ongoing deforestation in that country. And uh so we argued that as a result of neglecting uh to take action to protect uh the rainforests, which of course are important to people around the world, uh as a result of neglecting to protect those, uh the United States is actually incentivizing uh further deforestation because it is providing a uh unlimited opportunity for Brazil to export beef to the United States and to profit from that deforestation. So we think it's it's quite um alarming that the USDR is even considering uh not including beef because uh, as you indicated, deforestation was one of the seven sections, economic sectors that the USDR targeted in this investigation, and beef was prominent in that investigation.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

So this is yeah, overall, I mean, I think this has been a really helpful discussion. I think one of the big things for me was just seeing that, you know, a lot of times consumers they see the sticker price going up, and it really becomes something that everyone's paying attention to on and we just finished the 4th of July holiday. Andrew wrote a great piece about that. Um and you know, then consumers and and then all of a sudden you have this groundswell of of of support for some something to be done to kind of relieve this pressure. And you're pointing out to the fact that you know these are these are these these problems have been 40 years in the making. So and I think that that's one of the big takeaways for me is just understanding like how important this isn't just something that just happened over the past few months. This has been growing over time. And I wanted to, I think before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a chance to maybe offer our listeners one one big takeaway for for that you would like them to kind of think about when they're thinking about these issues and when they're paying so much at the at the sticker price for for beef.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Well, the big takeaway is the U.S. cattle industry is the single largest segment of American agriculture, and there are cattle in every state of the Union, and cattle producers are the economic cornerstones of communities all across America. So, as we have been hollowing out our cattle industry, we have likewise been hollowing out rural America. Uh we are losing economic uh viability, activity in our rural communities, and it must be reversed. And then, of course, we have the national security component of this. And so it is in our nation's interest uh to begin rebuilding our domestic industry, and we need to rebuild what we had that worked so well, and that was a family-scale farming and ranching operation in the United States, consisting of widely dispersed producers that are somewhat immune to any regional outbreaks of disease or climatic uh uh problems. And so um Americans should begin asking for beef that is uh exclusively born, raised, and harvested in the United States. And uh they can help the industry to rebuild uh by choosing to buy the highest quality beef that is produced under the best of conditions, and that of course is USA beef.

SPEAKER_03 29:45

Bill Bullard of RCAF USA, thank you for joining the big three. It's clear that America cannot import its way back to affordable beef. Record imports haven't lowered prices, prices have risen alongside imports, and imports also don't create a single new American calf or a single new American rancher. If policymakers actually want beef prices to come down and to stay down, I think that the only answer is rebuilding the productive base here at home, and that starts with America's ranches. Learn more about our work at CrossFurtsAmerica.org. You can find us on YouTube, and you can also catch the big three on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcast. Bill, thanks again.