The President of the United States is going to rebuild the American cattle herd by importing three hundred thousand tonnes of somebody else's beef.
Friday morning, on Truth Social. For ninety days, up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef comes in with no out-of-quota tariff, sold at a promised twenty-five per cent below the market, and the stated purpose is to give the Great American Beef Herd room to grow again.
A herd grows exactly one way. A rancher holds a heifer back instead of selling her, feeds her through two winters, and gets a calf out of the far end. He only does that if the price tells him the calf will be worth having. There is no committee, no roadmap, no button in Washington. Every decision about the size of the American herd for the next five years is being made this autumn, in a pen, by people doing arithmetic on the back of a feed bill.
So the government has picked this autumn to guarantee cheap beef.
The tariff being waived is not a rounding error either. Beef inside the quota pays 4.4 cents a kilo. Beef above it pays 26.4 per cent, which on beef worth seven dollars a kilo comes out over a dollar eighty a kilo in duty. That wall is the only thing standing between an American calf and the cheapest carcass on earth, and it has come down for a quarter of a year. All of it buys, by one analyst's sum, about forty-four days of American ground beef.
The reaction took roughly an hour. Colin Woodall of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association said it sacrifices long-term stability for short-term messaging. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts, both Nebraska Republicans, went public against a president of their own party on a Friday, which senators do not do for fun. The United States Cattlemen's Association pointed out that 300,000 tonnes is roughly half of everything America has exported all year, landing inside three months, through an inspection system that has already had to recall a consignment of Argentine beef once.
Nobody has said which countries it comes from. Nobody has explained how a president makes a supermarket sell mince at a discount.
The herd is the smallest it has been since 1951. Beef and veal ran 9.4 per cent up on the year last month. Ranchers have had two profitable seasons after a decade of drought and sold-off cows, and were finally in a position to breed rather than liquidate.
Every word of the Washington argument was made in Britain from the 1870s onwards. Food is dear, the world will sell it cheaper, and the man in the field will have to adjust.
He adjusted. He sold up.
@rand_longevity@foundmyfitness Except glucosinolates in broccoli (and other cruciferous veggies) compete with iodine at the thyroid. Gotta be sure you’re getting enough iodine! https://t.co/BPFMTvRsN4
@nickk396555@ColinVankeith@nicknorwitz “Lifetime exposure to elevated LDL…” in the presence of what confounding factors? To my knowledge, the studies leading to this conclusion have not dealt with ALL of the nuances AND were carried out using subjects from what we might now consider an “unhealthy” population. 🤷🏽♂️
@KiwiCryptoNan@JoshuaTGaines@LDLSkeptic@Costco In the USA, no GMO means there is no genetic modification, but pesticides and herbicides can be used. Organic means non-GMO AND no herbicides/pesticides. Does non-GMO mean the same thing in NZ?
@RyanWalters_ If you’re so committed to this, why did you leave? Hang it up. You moved on, so Oklahoma schools are moving on too. Up from where you dragged them down — 50th in education.