The Republican Playbook for Saving the American Rancher
The Republican Playbook for Saving the American Rancher
Tariffs and antitrust are yin and yang. Ranchers need both for a functional market.
On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, and the manufacturing policy director Pete Navarro held a joint press conference to provide an update on their antitrust investigation of the Big Four meatpackers, which combined control more than 85 percent of the U.S. beef processing market. This investigation began with President Donald Trump’s November request, in which he accused the packers of “driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.” Blanche said his department has reviewed more than 3 million documents and contacted hundreds of ranchers, cattlemen, producers and processors in the six months since.
With this action the administration is taking on hardcore government investigation– and litigation-survivors. The largest of the packers, JBS, is a Brazilian conglomerate whose owners pled guilty in 2020 to a bribery scheme that financed their original entry into the American market. In 2023, the Biden Antitrust Division filed a civil suit against Agri Stats, the data intermediary the packers allegedly used to coordinate; that same year, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced legislation to break up meatpacking, and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), in his capacity as then-Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, investigated JBS for “turning a blind eye as parts of its supply chain burn down the Amazon, push the world toward climate catastrophe, and undercut American ranchers”. More recently, not to be outdone by the Trump administration, Senate Democrats led by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer have introduced their own legislation to break up the dominant meatpackers. And McDonald’s, Target, Kroger, Sysco—everybody who is anybody is suing the Big Four.
All Americans should pray for their breakup. But even that won’t be enough. Antitrust needs to be paired with tariff protection if American ranchers can finally enjoy a functioning home market. Ranchers need certainty as to how much of their home market will be traded away to imports if they’re going to set about rebuilding.
The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF USA), an association of independent ranchers that itself launched a class action lawsuit in 2019 against the packers, details the depth of the hole we find ourselves in. The U.S. cattle herd today is 86 million head—smaller than it was in 1951, when only 154 million Americans relied on it instead of today’s 340 million. The herd peaked at 132 million in the mid-1970s and has been shrinking ever since, even as the population it has to supply more than doubled. The calf crop is the smallest since 1941. Almost three-quarters of lamb and close to 20 percent of beef consumed in America are imported. Between 2017 and 2022, more than 106,000 beef-cattle operations disappeared. Of every 10 ranchers in business in 1980, fewer than five remain.
Brazilian beef imports are surging so far in 2026, up 21 percent from a year ago. And 2025 itself was a record for Brazilian beef shipments to the U.S., topping $1.75 billion, up 39 percent from 2024.
A generation ago, the American rancher kept 63 cents of every consumer dollar spent on beef; the packer and retailer split the remaining 37. By 2021, those numbers had inverted. Today the rancher receives 37 cents and the middle of the chain takes 63.
The cash market—the open auction in which independent ranchers price-discover their cattle, the one functioning piece of competitive market machinery left in the industry—has collapsed. In 2005, more than half of fed cattle were sold through the cash market. Today it is below 22 percent. The rest is captive supply: cattle owned outright by the packer, or pre-committed under formula contracts packers dictate.
What R-CALF USA calls the “chickenization” of the beef industry is no metaphor. In poultry, more than 90 percent of birds raised in America are grown by farmers under contract to an integrator that owns the chickens, dictates the inputs, and sets the price. Independent chicken farmers, in any meaningful sense, no longer exist. The cattle industry is on the same trajectory. Without intervention, the American rancher of 2040 will be an indentured contractor for a foreign-owned packer, or out of business.
The good news is that ranchers have been in similar trouble in the past, and the Republican Party was able to deliver the solution.
In 1887, meatpackers were on a tear: The railroads had opened the High Plains, and in between the ranches out west and consumers out east stood the packers, able to dictate terms of the market. The packers were thriving, but the ranchers who actually owned the steers were going broke. Known as the Beef Trust, the packers—Swift, Armour, Morris, and Hammond—had consolidated control of the dressed-beef market and, through Chicago’s railroad chokepoint, dictated prices of every range steer west of the Mississippi.
A special Senate select committee was formed and chaired by George Vest, who would spend 18 months documenting the packers’ abuses. The Vest Committee Report of May 1890 found that the “depression in the prices paid to the cattle raiser” came from “the artificial and abnormal centralization of markets, and the absolute control by a few operators thereby made possible.” Substitute Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef for Swift, Armour, Morris, and Hammond, and the Vest Committee could be reporting from May 2026.
The Republican response was double-barreled. In 1890, the 51st Congress—part of a GOP trifecta during the first two years of Benjamin Harrison’s presidency—passed both the Sherman Antitrust Act and the McKinley Tariff Act, the strongest protection-first tariff to date. (Incidentally, this Congress also created National Forests and Land Grant Colleges—an inspiring record.) The McKinley Tariff included a “specific duty” of $10 per head on imported cattle, replacing the prior ad valorem 20 percent rate. Tariff protection plus antitrust would be the yin and yang needed to build a functioning domestic market for the cattleman and consumer: Sherman to break the cartel, McKinley to keep foreign supply from ruining domestic rebuilding.
Unfortunately, the cattlemen got the tariff and lost the antitrust fight. The 1895 E.C. Knight decision gutted Sherman against vertically integrated combinations. Roosevelt’s 1902 prosecution produced Swift v. United States (1905)—Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s celebrated “stream of commerce” opinion, doctrinally enormous but operationally a failure for ranchers. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) put the Chicago packers on every front page in America the following year; the resulting Federal Meat Inspection Act addressed sanitation rather than market power, and the larger packers quietly welcomed it as a regulatory barrier their smaller competitors could not afford. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair lamented, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The structural fight remained unwon, and concentration kept rising.
Republicans learned the hard way in the 1890s and 1900s that a strong tariff without domestic competition is a political albatross. Theodore Roosevelt himself walked out of the 1912 Republican Convention partly over unresolved antitrust politics, splitting the party and handing Woodrow Wilson a Democratic trifecta. Once elected, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, Wilson demanded that American producers be thrown into unlimited price competition with imports the world over.
Antitrust without a tariff leaves the domestic producers exposed to ruinous imports from foreign cartels beyond American jurisdiction. Run only one, and you do not get half a result. You get nothing.
Six months after Wilson’s speech, both live cattle and beef—among a host of other goods—were put on the free list. Imports surged. Chaos from the Mexican Revolution pushed Sonora and Chihuahua herds across the Rio Grande; imports from Canada rose with the wartime collapse of British demand; and Wilson’s “effective competition” arrived on schedule. Gross American farm income fell from $17 billion in 1919 to $10 billion in 1921. Farm foreclosures more than tripled after Wilson urged farmers and ranchers to load up on debt to feed the world. The McKinley generation’s worst fears were vindicated empirically.
It ultimately took 30 years for the cattlemen to win on the antitrust front. The newly created independent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) produced the six-part Report on the Meat-Packing Industry (1918–20), documenting the Big Five’s 82 percent control of interstate cattle slaughter and their stranglehold on stockyards, market wires, refrigerator cars, and 114 unrelated commodity lines. Facing a credible nationalization threat, the packers signed the Consent Decree of February 27, 1920—a real divestiture.
Republicans had regained Congress in 1918, the White House in 1920, and on May 27, 1921 passed the Emergency Tariff Act, naming cattle, sheep, beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork as the protected commodities. (Wilson had vetoed the same tariff relief on his last day in office.) The future was bright for ranchers.
Still, cattlemen knew a decree could be undone by a future administration. So they pushed for statutory reinforcement, and the Republican Party delivered. In 1921, under President Warren G. Harding, a Republican Congress (another glorious trifecta) passed two laws back-to-back: the Packers and Stockyards Act, giving USDA comprehensive authority over packer purchasing with broader prohibitions than the Sherman Act; and the Emergency Tariff Act of May 27, restoring agricultural protection that Wilson’s radical free-trade experiment had stripped away. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 made the protection permanent, in the McKinley specific-duty tradition.
The combination worked. The four-firm concentration ratio fell from 82 percent in 1918 to 41 percent by 1947.
Neither tariff protection nor antitrust would last, however. First to go were the tariffs. With the Democrat trifecta win in 1932, Congress would transfer its tariff authority to FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1934. Hull promptly eliminated tariff protection, and the United States signed on to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947. After a Mexican foot-and-mouth quarantine was lifted in 1955, the dam broke. Cattle imports surged from 86,056 head in 1954 to 1,250,029 in 1962. Ranchers successfully rallied and Congress delivered the Meat Import Act of 1964, although President Johnson ensured it had enough loopholes so he could trade away home market access for foreign favors.
Defeats would arrive on the antitrust front, too. The Reagan Justice Department terminated the 1920 Consent Decree. Tyson acquired IBP. Brazilian JBS bought Swift; Marfrig of Brazil now majority-owns National Beef. Two of the four firms that buy 85 percent of American fed cattle are foreign-controlled, and the four-firm concentration ratio is higher today than when Senator Vest opened his investigation. The Reagan-era promise of efficiency-driven consumer relief has produced wholesale beef prices nearly twenty percent higher than a year ago, with rancher prices flat or falling. The empirical case has collapsed.
Trump now has the chance to do what only Harding’s 1921 Congress managed—deliver both halves of home market protection.
On the antitrust side, the DOJ probe should produce a structural remedy modeled on the 1920 Consent Decree, codified by Congress in a modernized Packers and Stockyards Act. Captive supply, vertical integration into feeding, foreign ownership, and information-sharing intermediaries all need direct statutory treatment.
On the tariff side, the Administration should launch a Section 232 investigation covering grazing livestock—cattle and beef, sheep and lamb. Section 232 authority can be used to phase in tariff protection and give ranchers the certainty they need to rebuild the domestic herd.
The objection that tariffs cause shortages misses the lever the United States already has. The existing beef tariff-rate quota—administered by USTR and USDA—can be tightened gradually, allowing imports to fall in step with herd growth. No shortage, no consumer price shock; a planned, multi-year reconstruction of the American cattle supply.
Finally, Trump should work with Congress to codify both halves into permanent statute. Regulatory arrangements that depend on a single administration’s discretion get unwound by the next administration. Harding’s Republican Congress understood this. The current one should do no less.
The American cattlemen of 1890 lost the first round, won the second, and watched their grandchildren lose the victory. The choice now is not between free trade and protection. It is between an honest American protectionism—tariffs and antitrust together, codified by statute—and the dystopia in which independent American ranching disappears, replaced by foreign-controlled, vertically integrated supply chains feeding American consumers at rising prices over the broken backs of American producers.
The 1921 Republican Congress chose the first. Trump and the 119th Congress should make the same choice.
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