10/25/2025
🥲
It’s a strange time to be in agriculture. For the first time I can remember, the people who raise America’s beef are being cast as the problem. Somewhere along the line, ranchers became the villains in a story they never wrote.
I’ve spent my life around these folks, and I’ve never once met one who fits that label. I’ve seen them knee-deep in mud at midnight, trying to save a cold calf. I’ve watched them carry medicine to a sick one, fix windmills in the freezing dark, and spend long hours wondering if this year’s calves will be enough to pay the banker and maybe afford a decent Christmas for their kids. None of them are scheming against consumers — they’re just trying to stay afloat.
The reality is that true profit in ranching comes around maybe two years out of twenty. The rest of the time, it’s barely hanging on through droughts, markets, and debt. Yet somehow, we’re told we’re getting rich off the consumer.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve explained that ranchers don’t set the price of beef at the grocery store. We don’t own the packing plants, the trucking lines, or the retail shelves. But that truth seems to get buried under outrage, politics, and the idea that someone in a cowboy hat must be to blame for high prices.
It’s disheartening to see hard-working families, the last 1.2% of Americans still producing food for the other 98%, treated as if they’re doing harm. Someday, people will look back and wonder how it happened — how a nation came to distrust the very hands that fed it.
Until then, the work goes on. The cattle still need care, the fences still need fixing, and the rancher will still be out there before daylight. Because feeding people isn’t about applause — it’s about purpose.