Where is Trump's tariff-free beef coming from?

Cattle farmers are latest Trump allies to get shafted

By kos

The agricultural sector has been struggling ever since it helped Donald Trump win a second term.

His tariffs have constrained key overseas markets, with China shifting major soybean and other commodity purchases toward countries like Argentina and Brazil. 

Immigration raids have created labor shortages and driven up the cost of harvesting crops, some of which have been left rotting in the fields.

But there was one corner of agriculture that was thriving: cattle farmers.

A shortage of cattle combined with strong domestic demand meant high prices. Cattle producers also argue that near-monopoly conditions in the processing industry have pushed prices even higher. Since the 1990s, Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef have controlled upward of 80% of purchases of cattle, squeezing cattle farmers on one end while consumers pay more on the other.

Still, despite challenges like the New World screwworm outbreak, likely boosted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, cattle farmers were riding high, their faith in Trump apparently rewarded.

That is, until Friday, when Trump announced that he would temporarily allow a massive influx of tariff-free foreign beef into the United States, explicitly intended to undercut domestic beef prices by 25%.

“Today, I concluded a deal to substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “[F]or the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”

Weirdly, Trump is refusing to say which countries will supply all this mystery meat—an omission that becomes particularly notable amid concerns about the spread of New World screwworm.

On its face, Trump’s announcement is an extraordinary admission that even he knows his economic policies aren’t working.

First, he’s temporarily lifting tariffs to lower consumer prices. That’s a pretty remarkable concession from a president who has spent years insisting that foreign countries pay his tariffs rather than American importers and, ultimately, American consumers.

If removing a tariff makes beef cheaper, what exactly does imposing one do?

Trump, of course, tried to blame high prices on former President Joe Biden. But Trump campaigned on ending inflation “on Day 1,” and consumers have watched prices rise sharply since he returned to office.

The announcement also exposes the contradiction between Trump’s “America first” protectionism and his sudden concern about affordability. If the solution to expensive American beef is to flood the market with cheaper foreign beef, then perhaps the entire edifice of his economic agenda isn’t quite as sturdy as advertised.

And this is transparently an attempt to give consumers some relief before the midterm elections.

Notice the duration: “for the next 90 days.”

That gets Trump to the middle of November, just after the election.

For all Trump’s insistence that “affordability” is a “hoax” and a word Democrats somehow “devised” out of thin air, his own administration is now scrambling to engineer lower grocery prices before voters head to the polls. Republicans are getting hammered over the cost of living, and Trump is now scrambling for anything that would allow him to declare victory over inflation. 

Now, the cattle industry is spinning out. 

“Betrayal” was the single-word post on X from Meriwether Farms. 

Mark McHargue, the president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau, was more expansive.

“[T]he strength of cattle markets is one of the few bright spots within agriculture, and even with strong prices, Nebraska cattlemen are making tough decisions given severe drought, wildfires, and higher input costs including hay and fuel,” he wrote in a statement. 

“Temporary injections of tariff-free beef to ‘maybe’ address higher beef prices only creates short-term pain on feeder calf prices without long-term solutions for cattle producers. Supply and demand aren’t a far-reaching academic concept, it is the real-world scenario our cattle industry finds itself in, and short-sighted government policy only serves to provide long-term damage to an unbelievably complex beef supply chain,” he continued.

An open letter being passed around by farmers on social media is even more direct:

Dear President Trump, the American farmers are tired of being your political pawns. We’ve stood by you through so much but we are at the breaking point. Fuel is killing us, interest rates are killing us, labor is hard to find and we can’t afford it if we do and now you go and kill the one operation that is finally making a small profit by taking in more foreign beef that’s supposedly going to be sold at a discount. We know how that will work, the middle man will keep all that profit and we will pay the bill as taxpayers. The horse is out of the barn as far as keeping the government out of ag so it’s time for you to clean up your mess and quit blaming it on Biden even though he was a failure as a president.

Biden was a failure? It’s Trump that’s killing them now.

There’s a perverse irony to Trump’s economy. The people most insulated from his economic mismanagement are those with substantial investments in the stock market—disproportionately the affluent coastal elites whom MAGA supposedly exists to torment. Meanwhile, many of the people absorbing the consequences of his tariffs, immigration crackdown, higher input costs, and now his election-year manipulation of agricultural markets live in the rural communities that form the backbone of his political coalition.

They keep expecting Trump to hurt somebody else.

Eventually, they discover that they’re the “somebody else.”

May they have the day they voted for.