American families are getting crushed at the meat counter. The January inventory put the domestic cattle herd at 86.2 million head, the smallest since 1951. Four firms control roughly 85 percent of fed cattle slaughter, and most independent producers have exactly one realistic buyer within economic hauling distance. That did not happen by accident. Washington watched it happen across four decades and declined to stop it.
President Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins deserve real credit for the Ranchers First Initiative announced August 31. It arrives with the BRAND endorsement for producers who hold heifers back, guaranteed lending for regional processors under SPUR, a continuity effort aimed at the independent plants still standing, and a federal procurement preference for American beef. Taken together it is the most serious structural defense of the independent cattleman in forty years. It follows a Justice Department and USDA antitrust investigation into the four largest packers, and Secretary Rollins is right about the diagnosis: the foreign-owned share of American beef processing has become unsustainable.
The market is handing down its own verdict. Packer margins reached negative $314 a head in late June, and Tyson has guided investors to a beef operating loss between $500 and $650 million while closing or selling four plants. But the same correction strips out capacity the country will need once the herd grows again. A hook that comes off the line in 2026 is not there in 2031 when the calves arrive, and it does not come back on its own.
The arithmetic of rebuilding is unforgiving. Every heifer held back for breeding is a carcass that leaves the retail supply immediately, so rebuilding the herd tightens the beef market well before it loosens it. If working families watch steak prices climb again this fall while we cannibalize retail supply to rebuild the breeding herd, political support will be gone by spring.
So ask why the herd is not already growing, when cattle prices have never been higher. Record prices function as a liquidation signal: they pay a rancher handsomely to sell the exact animal he needs to keep. An 800-pound heifer brought roughly $2,500 at auction in late August. A rancher who holds her back turns that money down, then carries her at an annual cow cost near $1,100 for the better part of two more years before she weans her first calf. The Kansas City Fed found replacement cattle now cost double their twenty-year average, and inventories kept shrinking anyway through five straight years of favorable price-to-feed ratios. The highest bid in history for a young female is, in practice, a bid not to keep her.
The pressures underneath are worse. Seventy-one percent of American farms and ranches operate on margins below ten percent; among small operations, 82 percent. In early May, Oklahoma State's Derrell Peel put 79 percent of the beef cow herd in the twenty-six leading cattle states under drought, and CattleFax reports that producers who try to hold heifers are shipping them down the road for want of grass. We have built a market that pays a man well to sell his future and charges him for the privilege of keeping it.
Two things have to sit alongside the framework already announced: breeding stock that comes from somewhere other than the meat case, and a retention guarantee that runs long enough to matter.
A port dedicated to heifers
On the first, USDA should open a channel dedicated to sexually intact open heifers, drawn from named, pre-qualified herds in northern Mexico, at a port separate from the commercial feeder traffic. Columbus, New Mexico is the right place, and no rulemaking is required: Columbus has been a designated port of entry for ruminants from Mexico for years under 9 C.F.R. § 93.403(c). What closed it was administrative action under the Animal Health Protection Act, making reopening a discretionary call the agency can make on its own authority — and USDA's July announcement already named Columbus among the ports next in line after Douglas.
You don’t need to change the opening for Santa Teresa. Santa Teresa is the high-capacity commercial artery; restricting it to breeding females would penalize the feedlot buyers who have waited more than a year for it, and it should reopen unencumbered. Columbus is smaller and closer, and it can open for heifers at the same time Santa Teresa opens for feeders.
The reason to separate them is both operational and administrative. The protocol requires breeding females to be held at least a half mile from steers, which is why this program cannot ride along on the feeder traffic: one crossing, with one set of alleys and pens, cannot serve both classes without either breaking the separation or throttling the throughput the industry is waiting on. When you separate the classes by port, geography can satisfy the requirements while keeping administration and throughput more efficient.
What makes it safe
Obviously, any serious proposal has to start with New World screwworm, because screwworm is why the border closed and why it should never be reopened carelessly. The protocol was developed in partnership with Jeffrey Geider, former Director of the Institute of Ranch Management at Texas Christian University and now a senior advisor to World Food Bank Group. It is offered for execution in coordination with APHIS, COPEG, SENASICA, state animal health officials, and the land-grant universities, which can also assist in the data gathering, monitoring, and evaluation.
An imported heifer is not inherently safer than a domestic one, and no one should claim otherwise. Safety here is built, deliberately, out of five things applied to every single animal: individual veterinary inspection, with any visible wound disqualifying: injectable ivermectin or doramectrin at the herd of origin three to five days before export; the coumaphos dip with the head fully submerged; the tuberculosis skin test and the brucellosis testing required of sexually intact females; and quarantine on arrival. Every heifer carries individual identification from the export pen forward under 9 C.F.R. Part 86, and source herds are named and pre-qualified against disease status current at the time of shipment, not just a year in advance.
Two further features reduce the exposure. The channel admits open heifers only, so no animal arrives pregnant, and no calving occurs at entry or during the hold, which keeps the newborn navel, the fly's preferred target, out of the border equation. The first U.S. case of this outbreak, confirmed in Zavala County in June, was the umbilicus of a three-week-old calf. And the first cohorts cross in late autumn, so the holding window falls in the months when the fly cannot complete a life cycle. This is already established. FAO's own account of the American eradication campaign records that calving was deliberately timed to the cold months because newborn navels were common infestation sites.
Conception is then managed here, on American operations, to the timing and genetics that U.S. cow-calf operators actually want, bred to their bulls, calving in their season, finishing into their market. If the Department wants the full interval walked out, conception to birth and birth to sale weight, we are glad to do it.
Consider what that produces. Two hundred thousand open heifers, brought across in staged cohorts over two years at roughly four hundred head a day and bred here, produce close to 600,000 calves over the following five years at an ordinary weaned calf crop and normal death loss. Half are heifers; retained, they carry the breeding base past 600,000 females by year seven, as the first American-born daughters begin calving, approaching a quarter of the 2.5 million cows analysts say this country needs to add. The other half are steers, and while those numbers will account for only an increase of 1% in animals going to market, the revenue helps offset the cost of any cow/calf operation. Unlike imported feeders or boxed beef, every one of those animals is additive: conceived, born, raised and finished here.
Two hundred thousand head is the whole of the request. Under 9 C.F.R. § 93.412 the importer carries the traditional cost of the handling and inspection facilities at the port, so the channel itself is not built with appropriated money. The oligopoly that hollowed out the independent producer grew up inside federal policy, and repairing it is a legitimate use of public authority.
Two years is the wrong number
Which brings us to the one place the Ranchers First framework stops short of its own objective.
The BRAND endorsement ensures the income a rancher gives up by holding a heifer back rather than selling her. That is a valuable tool, though it only runs for two years. Large-scale retention takes roughly thirty months before a single additional calf is weaned, so heifers held back this fall will not expand supply until 2029. A two-year endorsement expires before the first calf it paid for ever reaches a grocery store. It leaves the producer to carry years three through five alone, the steepest part of the curve, and it leaves the compounding from proven females and their daughters entirely outside the window.
We suggest extending it to no less than five years. The extension is not free, and no one should pretend otherwise: a longer term is real federal exposure and deserves to be defended as such. Five years carries a heifer through roughly her first three calves, by which point she has paid for herself and retention sustains itself.
USDA has said openly that it has not yet worked out how continued ownership and pregnancy will be verified, what happens when a heifer fails to breed, or whether she can be sold inside the term. A cohort of imported heifers, individually identified and tracked from the export pen forward, of known age and entry date, answers all three by construction, and is the cleanest pilot population available for testing a five-year term before the Department extends it to domestic retention, where verification is far harder. BRAND requires Federal Crop Insurance Corporation approval and would normally pilot first. That is the procedural opening.
Finally, none of this works without somewhere to sell the calves. A rebuilt herd delivering into a still-shrinking number of buyers recreates the original problem at a larger scale. There is a strong case for guaranteed lending under SPUR, but grants alone will not close a plant's capital stack. $2 million against a $40 to $80 million plant is a rounding error on the equity requirement. Regional processing needs patient debt tenored to the working life of refrigeration, wastewater, and rendering, underwritten against committed throughput rather than land collateral. Private capital can close that gap, and that is where we intend to put ours.
Ranching runs on seasons. A ranch secures winter feed, water and labor long before spring calving, so a decision that slips past the fall placement window costs a full production year. That window is now. The federal government does not need to build this. It needs to open a port it has already said it would consider, dedicate it to heifers only, and stand behind the American rancher for five years instead of two.
Richard L. Lackey is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of World Food Bank Group, which has asked APHIS to open a dedicated open-heifer channel at Columbus, New Mexico, and which intends to finance regional processing capacity through the American Regenerative Agriculture Fund.
