Big Play M.A.

Rancher

[Pat Kroese @Walking_K_]

Continued cascade of negative news pushes cattle markets lower for 8 consecutive weeks. What's next? Listen in as D. Holaday and I discuss on this wks BI Livestock Mkt WrapUp - https://t.co/pTVQ5TkdfP

[The Timeless Traveler 🇺🇸 @TimelessTrvlr]

Mullen, Nebraska sits in the middle of the Sandhills, a part of the state where cattle outnumber people by a huge margin.

Mullen itself has only around 500 residents. Hooker County, where it sits, has fewer than 1,000 people and tens of thousands of cattle. Ranching isn’t part of the tourism pitch here. It’s just everyday life.

The landscape is what makes this part of Nebraska different. The Sandhills cover a massive stretch of north-central Nebraska, with rolling grass-covered dunes, wetlands, cattle, windmills and roads that seem to disappear into the horizon.

Highway 2 runs through Mullen as part of the Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway, and the drive alone is worth the trip. There aren’t many towns, billboards or subdivisions breaking up the view. Just grass, fences, cattle and a lot of sky.

Mullen is one of the few places where you can stop for gas, grab something to eat and take a break before heading back out.

The town grew after the railroad came through in the 1880s and became the county seat of Hooker County soon after. It’s still the only incorporated town in the county.

But the real reason I’d want to spend time here is after dark.

There’s very little artificial light in this part of Nebraska, and the Sandhills have some of the darkest skies in the state. On a clear night, the Milky Way can stretch across the sky in a way most people never get to see at home.

No skyline. No glow from a nearby city. No streetlights running to the horizon.

Just darkness and a ridiculous amount of stars.

That’s what makes Mullen interesting.

You don’t come here because there are 20 attractions to check off a list. You come for the drive, the open land, the quiet and the chance to see what the night sky looks like when there’s almost nothing getting in the way.

Drive the Sandhills during the day. Stop in town for a while. Find a dark spot before nightfall and look up.

Nebraska has a lot of places people pass through on their way somewhere else.

Mullen is a good reason not to rush.

I write about places like this in The Timeless Traveler newsletter. Places that get more interesting once you know what you’re looking at.

If that sounds like your kind of travel, subscribe.

https://t.co/eW2kBY27EE

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

Why am I paying taxes on my paycheck… then sales tax just to spend that money… then income tax on money that’s already been taxed… then property tax on land I bought with taxed money after paying sales tax on it… then vehicle tax just to drive to work… gas tax to fill the tank… energy tax to keep the lights on… death tax when I die… and God help me if I try to save any cash, because they’ll just inflate that away too.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Four companies decide what an American steer is worth. In 2019 a Nebraska rancher decided to become a fifth.

Before the story, this month. On 13 August Tyson shut its beef plant at Joslin, Illinois, taking another buyer out of the market. Fed cattle are down around twenty-nine dollars a hundredweight since late June. Calves sold five to fifteen lower this week. And on 21 August ranchers were told from a podium that the answer to expensive beef is three hundred thousand tonnes of somebody else's, tariff free, for ninety days, and that they should be patient while they rebuild the herd that same announcement gives them a reason not to rebuild.

The answer to all of that was already poured in concrete six years ago by a man with no particular advantages.

Rusty Kemp runs cattle near Tryon, out in McPherson County. In 2019 he was on a trade mission to Japan and Vietnam with the governor, and somewhere in the course of it he said the thing every cattleman says in private, which is that the price of his animals is set by people he will never meet and there is nothing he can do about it. Pete Ricketts told him to go and build his own plant.

Most men would have laughed. That autumn Kemp started ringing round.

He had timing, in the way only disasters provide. Fire took out the Holcomb plant in Kansas that August and kill slots vanished overnight. Then covid, plants shut, and ranchers sat on finished cattle they could not move while the price of mince in town went up. Anybody who still believed the system had slack in it stopped believing it in about a fortnight.

Ten of them put their names to it. Ranchers and feeders, mostly from within a couple of hundred miles. They picked North Platte, which in 2021 was the fastest shrinking town in Nebraska, and they built on a retired municipal sewage lagoon, which is either poetic or just the only ground going.

Then the hard part. Two and a half years of construction, inflation running through every quote, and a build that came in around four hundred million dollars for 550,000 square feet. Walmart took a minority stake and a board seat in 2022 and agreed to buy the beef, which is the moment it stopped being an idea and started being a plant.

On 28 May 2025 the gates opened. Kemp drove in with three black Angus of his own and put them over the scale himself, six years after that conversation on the other side of the world. Behind him came a semitrailer with forty head off another founder's feedlot at Hershey. Two loads of eighty on the day, which is nothing, which is the point, because they were learning to do it properly.

It runs up to 1,500 head a day now, one shift, eight hours, forty hour weeks, heading for around 850 people on the payroll in a town that had spent twenty years losing them.

Kemp is careful about what he claims. One plant does not fix an industry and he is not taking on the Big Four. His argument is that there is an enormous amount of room between a five thousand head a day plant and the local butcher, and nobody had been standing in it.

That room is still empty. It is empty in Texas, in Missouri, in the Dakotas, in every state where the nearest buyer just got further away.

Ten men and a sewage lagoon. No podium, no ninety day window, no press release.

Nobody is coming. That turns out to be the good news.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The best year in the history of the American cattle business is the year the ranchers are leaving.

He sells his calves for the highest prices anyone can remember.

He watches the national herd fall to its smallest since 1951.

He watches the calf crop fall to its smallest since 1941.

He sees his neighbours quit in the best market in living memory.

He hears the President tell him to get his prices down.

He watches that President quadruple the beef coming in from Argentina.

He loses the packing plant that employed a third of the nearest town.

He counts four companies standing between his gate and the plate.

He finds every incentive pointing at selling the herd and none at rebuilding it.

The record price is real and he is finally getting it, ten years too late. It arrived after a decade of drought and forced selling that took the equity, the neighbours and the moment to expand, and it arrives now as the reward for having something left to sell rather than as a reason to breed more.

Because rebuilding means keeping back the heifers he could sell today at the best price of his life, feeding them through two winters, and betting on a market three years out that his own government is filling with cheap imports on purpose.

On Friday it filled it again. Three hundred thousand tonnes of foreign ground beef, tariff free for ninety days, sold at a quarter under the price he is getting, announced as the thing that will help him rebuild.

Best prices in history. Fewest ranchers in seventy five years.

Fifty years they told him his beef was killing the country. Now it costs too much, and that is his fault as well.

[Okie_Rancher @Okie_Rancher]

Trump not only didn’t end the federal reserve, he’s now expanded the concept of direct government market/value manipulation to the entire cattle industry.

This is not for the benefit of consumers, but solely for foreign packer campaign donors while giving the fake appearance of helping consumer prices. Prices will not drop. Packer profits will rise.

Between Israel’s Miriam Adelson/ Netanyahu and Brazils JBS/National Meat, we have become a voluntarily occupied nation… and it has nothing to do with immigration. Ironically, Trump lifted immigration enforcement for the same packers….

[E. Locke @SandSteelCotton]

Trump is still better than Harris/Walz but I'm disgusted with this beef thing. He's hurting our cattle ranchers. We should be stopping all foreign beef & pouring money into our OWN RANCHERS. Our OWN RANCHERS say it's the processing plants that are making bank. Not them. Why isn't Trump listening to ranchers?

[American Rancher Alliance/Hufeisen Ranch @WyoWagyu]

Trump’s plan to import 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef sounds massive—until you realize it equals only SIX DAYS of U.S. beef production.

That is not enough beef to permanently lower grocery prices. But it is enough foreign product to push cattle prices down, undercut American ranchers, and hand the greedy Big Four meatpackers even more control.

America already has the smallest cattle herd in 75 years. We should be rebuilding American agriculture—not making our country more dependent on foreign food.

And consumers deserve to know the truth: Foreign beef can be mixed with American beef and sold without clearly telling you where it actually came from.

The American Rancher Alliance is being built to change that.

We are creating a producer-owned, fully traceable beef supply chain where cattle are born, raised, and finished in the United States. Consumers will be able to scan a QR code and see the actual ranch, how the cattle were raised, and the standards behind their beef.

No foreign beef. No mystery meat. No corporate loopholes.

If Washington refuses to protect the integrity of American beef, American ranchers will do it ourselves.

Learn more and stand with American ranchers at https://t.co/b5tzholomj.

#AmericanRanchers #AmericanBeef #ForeignBeef #CountryOfOriginLabeling #COOL #BeefPrices #CattleRanchers #CattleIndustry #FarmersAndRanchers #FoodSecurity #BuyAmerican #AmericanRancherAlliance @POTUS @SecKennedy @joerogan @TuckerCarlson @GridironPosts

[Amanda Radke @RadkeAmanda]

From Politico: “What we are facing in America today is the direct result of a war on cattle by the previous administration,” @SecRollins said during a Fox Business interview.

“We started to import a lot more of our food [under Joe Biden]. We cannot survive as a country, we will not know freedom unless we can feed and fuel ourselves,” Rollins said.

https://t.co/HnvcwnKxdm

——

On behalf of a united front of independent cattle ranchers across America, I respectfully ask @POTUS to rescind this agreement to purchase foreign beef.

Actions such as this predicate the necessity of MCOOL. Any and all imported beef must be clearly labeled on its country of origin, so consumers have transparency and clarity of what they are purchasing at the grocery store.

A nation that cannot feed itself is not free, and America First cattle ranchers can and will rise to the occasion of feeding the world the highest quality beef you can find on planet earth.

Thank you for choosing USA Beef! 🇺🇸🥩

Amanda Radke
South Dakota cattle rancher
https://t.co/p1KOQpo7O2

#USABeef #Ranching #Cattle

[Charles W. Herbster @CWHerbster]

I am extremely disappointed with President Trump's decision to import 300,000 metric tons of beef into our markets. This will hurt our local producers and feedlots while doing nothing to help address long-term solutions to our fed cattle shortage.

Throughout the Trump administration, I have, along with other producers, offered solutions to give American cattle producers the tools and relief we need to grow our herds. We need to make it easier for our homegrown producers to succeed. I genuinely hope President Trump reconsiders this move and instead works with us to make our beef industry profitable for all producers and more affordable for consumers.

[Good Ranchers @GoodRanchers]

We understand why beef prices are a problem right now. Ground beef is averaging $6.89 a pound, up 57% since 2021, and that's real pressure on American families.

But flooding the market with 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef with no tariff for 90 days is not a solution for American ranchers. It's a short-term price fix that puts more downward pressure on the cattle producers who are already struggling to stay viable. Trump has not said which countries this beef is coming from or who committed to the 25% price reduction he's promising.

American cattle ranchers have been dealing with years of drought, high feed costs, and a shrinking herd. The answer to that is not more cheap imported beef with lower standards competing against them on shelves with no country of origin label required to tell you the difference.

We will continue to source 100% American. That is not changing.

[Big Play M.A. @MarcEricksen]

@ginamilan_ You have no clue what you are talking about

[Clint Svoboda @SvobodaClint]

Late day SHGC…

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

Income tax and property taxes should be abolished nationwide.

You shouldn’t have to pay the government for the privilege of earning your own money, and you damn sure shouldn’t have to keep paying the government forever just to remain in a home you already bought.

Tax consumption if you must.

Stop taxing Americans for working and owning property

[Brandon Stokley @bstokley14]

The crazies made the normal everyday person get the shot or they couldn’t do anything. A lot of people got fired for refusing to get the vaccine. You couldn’t go to sporting events without showing a vaccine card. These people need to be held responsible. They lied!!!

[Jeremy @jeremyct]

My house is paid off.
No mortgage. No bank. Nothing owed.

Took I and my wife 22 years and every extra dollar we ever had.

Except property taxes are $11,000 a year now.

If we don’t pay, armed men show up and take a house we already own outright.

We also paid 32% in income tax this year.

Plus sales tax on everything we bought.
Plus gas tax every time we filled up.

We paid off the house.
We still don’t own the house.

We just stopped paying the bank and started paying everyone else instead.

TAXATION IS THEFT

Property taxes shouldn’t exist.

[Mikey O’ver @MikeyOver1]

Absolutely hate players like this

You don’t have to put down your old school to build up your new one

You had plenty of talent and opportunity at Nebraska and couldn’t do anything with it

[Ben DiNucci @B_DiNucci6]

So 2 things

1. Cleanest Bo has looked mechanically in his NFL career - ball is jumping out of his hand , looks healthy

2. Waddle looks fun - Broncos haven’t had that type of playmaker in years

[Big Play M.A. @MarcEricksen]

@BrentHusker D-line is questionable

[Big Play M.A. @MarcEricksen]

@TexasAustyn Double trouble!