For Immediate Release: February 12, 2026
Contact: R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard
Phone: 406-252-2516; r-calfusa@r-calfusa.com
Please find below R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary that discusses President Trump’s proclamation to increase imports of lean beef trimmings from Argentina. It is in three formats: written, audio and video. Anyone is welcome to use it for broadcasting or reporting.
More Imports on the Way
Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA
One of the most common questions from journalists and reporters today is: Why are beef prices so high? President Trump provided his answer to this question in his Feb. 6, 2026, proclamation titled, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer.” The proclamation increases the in-quota quantity of lean beef trimmings that can be imported from Argentina by an additional 80,000 metric tons during the 2026 calendar year, which is in addition to the 20,000 metric ton annual in-quota quantity limit already applicable to Argentina.
The reasons cited by the president for his decision to increase Argentinian beef imports include the widespread drought that occurred in 2022, wildfires that have disrupted grazing and hay production, and the closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to live cattle imports due to Mexico’s New World screwworm outbreak.
The president stated that the combination of these factors has reduced the supply of cattle in the United States, which has resulted in higher beef prices for U.S. consumers, including higher prices for ground beef.
He stated that ground beef prices reached $6.69 per pound in December 2025, which was the highest ground beef price recorded since 1980.
He then stated that he has “a responsibility to ensure that hard-working Americans can afford to feed themselves and their families,” and so he is “taking action to temporarily increase the quantity of in-quota imports of lean beef trimmings …to increase the supply of ground beef for United States consumers.”
All of what the president said was true. The drought, the wildfires, and the closure of the Mexican border have all contributed to the downward trend of the U.S. cattle inventory.
But, and very importantly, those factors were not the initial cause of our downward-trending cattle inventory, they merely accelerated and accentuated that downward trend that began a little over a generation ago.
Today’s downward-trending cattle inventory, along with today’s downward-trending inventory of American cattle farms and ranches, can be traced back to a monumental shift in national policy that occurred just over a generation ago.
This shift began in the 1980s and continues today. Here’s what happened: The control over the largest segment of American agriculture – the live cattle industry and its downstream beef industry – was handed over to a tight oligopoly (meaning a small group of firms that control the lion’s share of the cattle and beef markets). That tight oligopoly, consisting of global firms, was then given unlimited access to inputs from around the world, enabling it to substitute domestic cattle and beef with foreign cattle and beef in whatever profit-maximizing ratio it chose.
And that’s what it did. It leveraged its oligopolistic power to pay less than a competitive price for cattle and leveraged its access to increasing volumes of price-depressing imports to reduce demand for domestic live cattle.
During the ensuing decades, hundreds of thousands of cattle producers exited the industry, and they took nearly 10 million of their mother cows to market.
We have the smallest cow herd in 75 years because we waited too long to address the reasons that over half our cattle producers and over a quarter of our mother cows were disappearing.
But we can begin doing so now. We can urge the president to rigorously enforce antitrust laws and the Packers and Stockyards Act to restore competition to cattle markets; urge him to encourage Congress to enact mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef so consumers can help build demand for U.S. cattle; and urge him to align our trade policy with the need to provide domestic producers relief from price-depressing imports so we can meet our food security objective of achieving self-sufficiency in beef production.
Despite record imports during the past three years, more imports are coming as a result of President Trump’s proclamation. Historically, increased imports mean lower cattle prices, an extended liquidation phase of the cattle cycle and fewer opportunities for aspiring farmers and ranchers to enter the industry.
But as to consumer beef prices, historically they’ve risen in concert with rising imports.
Cattle farmers and ranchers have no control over either wholesale or retail beef prices. But because that control is vested with the dominant packers and dominant retailers, if those dominant players feel the need to please the president, we could conceivably see a decline in consumer ground beef prices.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
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R-CALF USA’s weekly opinion/commentary educates and informs both consumers and producers about timely issues important to the U.S. cattle and sheep industries and rural America.
Ranchers Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA) is the largest producer-only trade association in the United States. It is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the continued profitability and viability of the U.S. cattle and sheep industries. For more information, visit www.r-calfusa.com or call 406-252-2516.