This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ben Spell, the founder of Good Ranchers, a meat and seafood delivery subscription company that sources all its products from American ranchers.
This month, President Donald Trump said he would allow up to 300,000 metric tons of beef to be imported into the US with no out-of-quota tariff over the next 90 days. Trump said he would also allow ranchers and farmers to process their own meat. The article has been edited for length and clarity.
My wife and I started Good Ranchers in 2018. Before that, I was a worship pastor and worked at one of the largest churches in Houston. Around 2015, after a Sunday service, God just put in my heart not to take a salary from the church. I was like, “Well, what does that mean?”
I had this idea to make a meat company. At the end of 2017, we just had our first baby boy, and I was getting ready for service. I came out of the bathroom, and I told my wife, “I think God told me to start a meat company,” thinking she was going to go, “We just had a baby. We don’t know anything about this.” Instead, she said, “If you heard God, then I trust you.”
I resigned at the end of that year, and in February, I started selling meat out of the back of a refrigerated box truck. By 2020, we had about 20 trucks going around the country. We started shipping online, shut down all the trucks by the end of 2021, and went fully online.
Our mission at Good Ranchers is to connect the American family to the American farm. Most of the ranches we work with are in Colorado, Utah, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. We have some in Texas and Nebraska as well.
While I hate the economics of how high meat prices are right now, I do think this is a wake-up call for consumers.
When they think of beef, they think of a cow factory or a hamburger, but the average herd size of the hundreds of thousands of independent ranchers in the United States is only about 50.
The price of beef has increased dramatically over the last five years. We’ve held our prices very stable, but we are at a tipping point. It’s not a 90-day fix.
Cattle prices need to be strong enough for ranchers to make money, and that’s how you can rebuild the supply, but cattle aren’t widgets. You can’t turn a factory on and produce millions more cattle next month. Rebuilding the herd takes years, and if we crush the economic incentive to rebuild today, we’re prolonging the supply problem we’re trying to solve.
I do think the president is correctly identifying a problem. Beef is too expensive for American families, but I strongly disagree that importing more cheap foreign beef with no transparency is going to fix the long-term solution.
We need to make cattle production attractive for producers to rebuild the herds, reduce unnecessary barriers and costs for American producers, and expand the domestic processing capacity and competition.
Imports
I’m hoping and trusting that we’ll get more information about the plan, but as that announcement sits, there’s so much ambiguity. We haven’t been told where the imported beef is coming from, how the cows were raised, what they were fed, what their health was like, or what antibiotics or vaccines were used.
It would mean a lot if this could get a mandatory country-of-origin labeling law put back in place for beef in the United States. That would be a huge win for American agriculture. One of the biggest hurdles we have is that people don’t realize that most of the meat they’re buying probably isn’t coming from the US.
We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be imports because they do play a part in the system, but American families should be able to look at a package of beef and know where the animal was raised. Let the consumer make the choice of what they want to purchase.
Processing
The president’s recent announcement is encouraging, but the details will determine whether it creates real competition or is a minor expansion on something ranchers can already do on a limited basis.
Under the current law, ranchers can already use a custom-exempt processor for personal or household consumption, but that means the meat must be marked as not for sale. It needs to be processed under a federal inspection and an eligible state inspection program or a cooperative interstate shipment program. Federal inspection is required for interstate commerce.
What Trump’s plan could do is open up more processing at the ranch level. Earlier this year, the USDA announced a processor action plan that made $60 million available for expanding independent and domestically owned processing capacity.
Hopefully, this will accelerate and broaden that network, which I believe is ultimately very good. This is not a political issue. It’s an issue of food governance and food safety for the American people. That’s really what we all want: high quality, transparency, and affordable prices at checkout.
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