An quick explanation of why Trump’s importation is bad long term

While well-intentioned, this will only exacerbate the long-term stock shortage in the cattle industry, and it will directly lead to HIGHER long-term beef prices.

Beef is a very cyclical industry, largely driven by the fact that it takes 9 months to create a new calf, and another… https://t.co/IBZrW6dVB0

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 21, 2026

While well-intentioned, this will only exacerbate the long-term stock shortage in the cattle industry, and it will directly lead to HIGHER long-term beef prices.

Beef is a very cyclical industry, largely driven by the fact that it takes 9 months to create a new calf, and another year or two (at a minimum) to bring it to market and process it. Because of the difficulty of predicting demand that far out, plus the difficulty of matching supply to that demand, we end up with big swings in prices in every five- to ten-year cycle.

Right now, we are at the price peak in the cycle. The only way to bring prices back down is to increase the supply, and that can only happen when farmers choose to retain cows to breed and grow the stock instead of selling them today. This is called heifer retention. When prices are high, farmers want to sell stock. When they’re low, farmers want to hold back the stock.

That’s the revenue side. Then there’s the cost side. Beef costs are driven by the three F’s: feed, fertilizer, and fuel. Right now, the costs of all three are through the roof.

Drought has driven up the costs of hay and corn, so both raising and finishing cattle is more expensive. Fertilizer costs have been high for years, due in part to the war in Ukraine. And gas prices have also been nuts because of Iran.

When costs are high, it makes more sense to sell a heifer than to retain it and breed it. Now imagine what happens when you are at a cyclical peak, leading to high prices, at the same time costs are sky-high: stock gets sold off instead of being bred, and the supply shrinks. Not good.

So wouldn’t that mean imports are a great way to fill the gap? NOT AT ALL. Why not?

A sudden surge of foreign imports means a short-term (and only a short-term) dip in prices (at best), and that will lead domestic producers to sell even more of their stock right now to get ahead of the deep.

But it’s even worse than that. As stocks dwindle, processors will reduce capacity. They can’t afford to run seven days a week long-term if the long-term supply is dwindling and only providing four or five days’ worth of cattle to process.

So not only will imports not fix the long-term domestic supply problem, they will actually result in long-term—perhaps even permanent—production capacity reductions as well. This isn’t a theoretical problem constrained to an economics textbook.

This is already happening in the U.S. Tyson, one of the biggest beef processors in the country, just announced it’s shutting down a massive facility in Utah due to lack of supply to process. It’s closing another facility in Illinois, and selling off a third one in Washington. JBS, another massive processor, shut down plants in Pennsylvania and Tennessee earlier this year. The biggest domestic processors are radically reducing their processing capacity because the long-term stock is too low to support it.

And if you want to know what happens when domestic industrial capacity shutdowns are paired with foreign imports, look no further than the American timber industry after Canada started dumping its subsidized lumber into our markets. Prices for domestic lumber were artificially pushed down, lumber processing capacity cratered, and within a matter of years, America’s lumber industry was destroyed, even though we had more than enough raw timber.

All because of short-sighted trade policy that ignored the obvious long-term impact of imports on supply and production capacity.

Instead of looking for short-term bandaids to mask the beef price problem heading into the mid-terms, the administration should instead focus on ways to incentivize heifer retention in order to increase long-term cattle supply.

That is the ONLY way through this.