For Immediate Release: March 6, 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 explains how the concentrated beef packers acquired and exercised their market power, resulting in the contraction of the U.S. cattle industry. It is in three formats: written, audio and video. Anyone is welcome to use it for broadcasting or reporting.
Part II: The State of America’s Beef Industry
Commentary by Bill Bullard, CEO, R-CALF USA
In Part I, we talked about how the concentration in the marketplace exploded from 1980 to 2021, and how that explosion in concentration resulted in a complete reversal of the allocation of the consumers’ beef dollar to each participant in the beef supply chain.
The market changes that occurred during the four decades between 1980 and 2021 include:
- Global beef packers captured 85% of the fed cattle market and about 80% of the boxed beef market, creating a tight oligopoly that far exceeds levels known to elicit poor economic performance and anticompetitive behavior.
- Over half – 52% – of all cattle farmers and ranchers were purged from the industry.
- Over a quarter – 26% – of the mother cow herd was eliminated.
- The global packers’ and retailers’ share of the consumer beef dollar increased 70%, while the cattle farmers’ and ranchers’ share decreased 41%.
- For consumers, the markup they paid for beef above the price of the cow increased 420%.
What went wrong?
Beginning just over a generation ago, our government began handing control of the largest segment of American agriculture – the U.S. cattle industry and its downstream beef industry – to a tight oligopoly. It then gave that tight oligopoly unlimited access to imports from around the world, enabling it to substitute domestic cattle and beef with foreign cattle and beef in whatever profit-maximizing ratio it chose.
Our government took a hands-off approach to overseeing the activities of the global beef packers. There was minimal, if not nonexistent, enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws; the U.S. Department of Agriculture refused to promulgate rules to implement and enforce the more than 100-year-old Packers and Stockyards Act that Congress passed to protect independent livestock producers from the abusive market power emanating from the highly concentrated beef-packing sector; the government neglected to align trade policies with America’s food security needs; and the global beef packers were not required to disclose the origins of their imported beef to consumers.
For the past four decades, global beef packers have systematically imported larger and larger quantities of foreign beef and cattle from around the world, increasing America’s dependency on foreign beef and cattle and relegating what was the largest beef-producing country in the world to a net beef and cattle importer. Much of this imported beef came from countries with weaker currencies, weaker livestock production and food safety standards, weaker oversight over veterinary biologics, and lower wage rates. But this imported beef was not differentiated from domestic beef because consumers were not afforded a label denoting from which country the beef they were purchasing in their grocery store originated.
As a result, lower-cost beef imports were a perfect substitute for domestic beef, and these imports began displacing domestic cattle farmers and ranchers, their cattle, and their production.
America’s cattle farmers and ranchers had no means of mitigating this subterfuge because U.S. import quotas were too high and tariff rates were too low. And, importantly, there were no labels to distinguish domestic beef from foreign beef in the marketplace. Consequently, consumers could not initiate any demand signals through their purchasing choices for beef based on where it was produced or by whom.
By keeping consumers in the dark as to beef’s origin, that important choice as to where beef is sourced was transferred to the global beef packers – they, and they alone, could unilaterally choose from where they would source their beef to satisfy what was nothing more than a generic demand for beef.
The nondisclosure of country-of-origin information is a tool the global beef packers use to exert their tremendous buying power in the marketplace to the detriment of cattle producers on one end of the beef supply chain and consumers on the other.
Free from restraints to limit import volumes and requirements to disclose the origins of beef, global beef packers used undifferentiated imports to reduce demand for domestic cattle, opportunities to expand the U.S. cow herd, and opportunities to attract new entrants.
And this triggered a long-term downward trend in the number of cattle farmers and ranchers and their cattle, which threatens the security of our beef supply chain. It also distorted the historical cattle cycle by extending the liquidation phases of each of the past four cycles for seven to eight years rather than the normal three to four years.
By 2010 – about 15 years ago – the U.S. cattle industry had already shrunk to a dangerously small size. It had shrunk to a level too small to withstand even a moderate economic shock.
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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.