Top Tweets for #Beefintelligence

Market access is the whole fight. Four in five cow-calf outfits in this country run under fifty head. They don't lack buyers. They lack a kill floor within hauling distance. Fourteen years into the state-to-interstate plant program, 163 plants are in it. Bundles like this live or die on the local plant.

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𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘀, 𝗟𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲 Our counters are well-stocked with high quality meats. In addition to Texas, USA 🇺🇸 raised beef, pork, chicken, and quail, you’ll find more local and Texas products along with other great gift items. 🚫 No hormones 🚫 No antibiotics 📍 Shop online 24/7 at https://t.co/IXhg6DX0ur or M-F 8 AM to 6 PM and Sat 9 AM to 3 PM at 380 Business Park Blvd, Luling, TX! #ranchtotable #TexasBeef #USAbeef #FoodSecurity #hometownmeatmarket

Facts!!! Following Biden's war on rural America, the Trump administration has also reallocated the CCC fund from paying for Biden's Scope 3 emissions tracking and carbon credit system to fund water infrastructure projects again so that farmers aren't forced to cut off water mid growing season! https://t.co/6rJh3XGYB0 The $12 billion relief fund from tariffs have also gone towards reimbursing farmers and ranchers for their loss when the Biden administration mandated the culling of entire poultry flocks, hog herds, and cattle throughout covid and H5NI. https://t.co/97JQGTUwum The administration has also reversed a multi-million dollar grant for killing barred owls in the PACNW, reversed Biden's ridiculous policies that prevented the management of wild horses, reversed Biden's fees for "unauthorized" and "excessive grazing" of cattle, and that's just the short list! https://t.co/xFBfIWjugs

You cannot govern a man with a herd. A herd walks. It cannot be fenced, counted, tithed or taxed, and the man behind it eats every day without asking anyone's permission. A field stays where it is, and so does the man in it. Every empire worked that out, and every empire did the same thing first. The Normans took the deer and the boar off the Saxon, made touching one a hanging matter, and left him pottage. The English took the cattle off the Irish, outlawed the herdsmen who drove them, and left them a root from the Andes. When the root failed, the cattle were still sailing out of Cork. The English took the cattle off the Highlander, put sheep on the glen, and left him oats, a potato and a passage to Nova Scotia. The Americans shot the bison from the trains, on purpose, because a colonel had said that every buffalo dead was an Indian gone, and left the Plains flour, sugar and lard by the sack. The Americans burned the Navajo's sheep and peach orchards in 1864, marched the people 300 miles, and fed them white flour and bacon fat. Frybread was invented out of that ration. The Soviets took the herds off the Kazakhs in 1930. A million and a half died inside three years, a third of the nation, and the survivors were handed a grain quota. The Soviets took the herds off the Mongols, the greatest horsemen who ever lived, and handed them a loaf and a collective. The Canadians shot the Inuit's sled dogs through the 1950s and 1960s, by the thousand, and the hunters who could no longer reach the seal moved into the settlement and ate from the store. The British took the range off the Maasai by treaty, cut the cattle count, and left maize meal. Every time, the animal first. Every time, the sack after. Every time, a people that had been tall, fed and impossible to govern became short, sick and on a register. Now it is the climate. Trees on the Welsh hill. A buyout for the Dutch dairy farmer. A tenth of the Irish dairy herd gone. Fourteen grams of red meat a day, says a committee, for the planet. The herd goes first. The sack comes after. In ten thousand years it has never once gone in the other order. The only new part is that this time you are being asked to hand the cow over yourself, and to feel good about it.

And I for one am grateful for it. I found our local rancher Kenneth from Sussex Ranch on the Beef Initiative site. Now four different families in our area get their beef from Sussex Ranch. So thank you for making it possible for families to shake a rancher’s hand and put quality local beef on their dinner tables.

I can raise the beef. But I CAN’T do this without my butcher. That’s something the headlines about processing problems keep reminding me. For a small ranch like ours, having a trusted independent processor isn’t a convenience. It’s part of our FOOD SYSTEM. I need someone who knows our cattle are coming. Someone who can harvest them. Someone who can cut and package that beef so I can get it to YOUR family. Big processing plants make headlines. But thousands of small ranchers depend on the small processors most consumers never hear about. Without our butcher, I can’t fill your freezer. That’s how important they are.

For those of you who only listen to the Rhetoric from the White House Falsely think that Trump is actually trying to fix things. For those who actively engage like Bryan Mussard you realize it is just a distraction. From March 2026 Bryan was actively working at fixing the Dietary Guidelines with Beef where it belongs. It was USDA that stopped it over Kennedy's suggestion.

One hamburger. Beef from TWO different countries? Yep. That can happen. The U.S. imports lean beef trim that can be blended with fattier beef from American cattle to make ground beef. So the hamburger on your plate may contain BOTH imported and American beef. That doesn’t mean the beef is unsafe. But if knowing WHERE your food came from matters to you, this is something worth knowing.

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Stripped of policy statements, studies to “consider” future action, conditional instructions, and directives with no measurable benchmark, I have listed below the only specifically identifiable, tangible deliverables mandated by the two Executive Orders: - Seven reports; - A website; - A new USDA coordinator for ranchers and small processors; and - Technical-assistance and training programs for small processors. That’s it. The orders mandate none of the advertised headline results: no MCOOL, no wolf delisting, no new right to sell custom-processed meat across state lines, and no actual prosecution of a major packer. Can you understand the frustration of America’s farmers and ranchers when they are used as a propaganda piece, on a day like yesterday, to make it appear to the public like their concerns are being heard?

Last Friday the President attacked the four companies that control 85 per cent of American beef processing, and the law that handed them the industry passed the House of Representatives by 402 votes to 1. On 28 August he posted that there are essentially four of them, a very non competitive number, and that they make life miserable for farmers and ranchers. The four are Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef. He had just suspended tariffs on 300,000 tonnes of imported beef trimmings, and his own ranchers had come for him. The rest of the story is 59 years old. On 15 December 1967 Lyndon Johnson signed the Wholesome Meat Act. A plant could only sell meat if it was federally inspected, or inspected by a state whose standards were equal to the federal ones, and state inspected meat could only be sold inside that state. Nobody opposed it. 402 to 1 in the House. 89 to 2 in the Senate. Everybody in that chamber was voting against filth in food. Every one of them was voting for a fixed cost. In 1967 there were 9,627 federally inspected livestock slaughter plants in America. By 1980 there were 1,627. Today a few dozen plants kill the overwhelming majority of American cattle. Four years in, the Small Business Administration told the Senate that it could be argued the Act was as much of a disaster for many small meat firms as a hurricane, and that during the 1967 debates there had been little discussion of what it would do to the 15,000 or so firms about to fall under it. So it was on the record by 1971. The defence is that the meat is safer. An inspector on a line running 400 cattle an hour is not doing the job an inspector did in a building that killed thirty a week. A compliance cost is a fixed cost, and a fixed cost is a gift to whoever can spread it over the most animals. Nobody in 1967 chose Tyson. They wrote conditions in which nothing but a Tyson could survive, and went home pleased with themselves. They can be forgiven that. Every Congress since has read the 1971 report and left the law exactly where it was. The PRIME Act would let states legalise the sale of custom processed meat inside their own borders. It has been introduced again and again for a decade and has never passed. A billion dollars of federal money went into expanding small processing capacity after the pandemic. The four still hold 85 per cent. And when a President finally used the word monopoly, the Meat Institute, which represents the four, warned against it. So did the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which represents the ranchers being squeezed. The men who wrote the law were not bought. Everybody who has defended it since has had a reason.