The other day, President Trump announced a 90-day plan to allow up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef into the U.S. tariff-free in an effort to bring down beef prices.
Why? Because beef prices are at an all-time high. Right now, ground beef is averaging $6.89 a pound, up 57% since 2021. For families trying to stretch a grocery budget, that increase is impossible to ignore.
But here’s the problem: foreign beef might cost lower in the short term, but it doesn’t fix what’s actually happening here at home.
High beef prices didn’t happen overnight. They’re the result of a much bigger problem that has been building for years: America simply doesn’t have enough cattle.
AMERICA’S CATTLE HERD NEEDS TO BE REBUILT
American cattle producers have spent years fighting through drought, rising feed costs, higher operating expenses, and shrinking margins. When drought dries up pasture and the cost of keeping cattle climbs, ranchers are often forced to make an incredibly difficult decision: reduce the size of their herd.
That means selling cows they otherwise would have kept for breeding.
And when breeding cows leave the herd, we don’t just lose beef today. We lose the calves those cows would have produced next year and the year after that.
That’s part of why rebuilding the American cattle supply takes time. You can’t manufacture another generation of cattle overnight. Ranchers have to retain heifers instead of selling them, invest in feed and land, grow their breeding herds, wait for calves to be born, and then raise those calves to market weight.
It’s a process measured in years, not 90 days.
And right now, at the exact moment ranchers need the confidence and financial stability to begin making those investments, we’re preparing to bring hundreds of thousands of tons of below-market foreign beef into the country.
Right now, we should be giving American ranchers every reason to rebuild. Instead, we’re asking them to compete with a sudden influx of cheaper imported beef.
This matters because ranchers make decisions based on what they believe the market will look like months and years from now. If cattle producers believe prices will be undercut by foreign supply, there’s less incentive to take on the expense and risk of holding back cattle to rebuild their herds.
For some producers, the safer financial decision may be to sell those animals now.
And that could push us in exactly the wrong direction: shrinking the American cattle herd when we need to be intentionally growing it.
