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Oct. 29, 2025 - Owen Shroyer Live
29:54
Owen Shroyer Interviews - Breeauna Sagdal From The Beef Initiative
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
One of the biggest stories right now in American politics is what is going on with beef?
Why are prices so high?
Why is Trump focusing on bailing out the Argentinian beef industry?
Why did a tariff on beef from Brazil just go down?
But more importantly, what's really going on in Washington, D.C. when it comes to the beef industry?
And why are your prices so high right now on beef?
So I go to my expert that I like to go to when these stories pop up.
Anything when it comes to cattle ranchers or the beef industry, I like to go to Brianna Sagdahl.
You can find her on X at Brianna9, policy fellow at the Beef Initiative, and really just well informed on these issues when it comes to the beef industry and the beef lobby, you might say.
Yes, the beef lobby.
So, Brianna, you know, I think let's start with the big glaring issue, which is something that everybody sees when they go to the grocery store and they like to get their ground beef or maybe they like to get their steaks.
Why are beef prices so high right now?
Is this something that can be fixed?
Is there a remedy?
Or is this just how it's going to be?
Those are great questions, Owen.
And I'm grateful to be on your new show.
Congratulations, by the way, going independent.
Glad to be here.
So certainly this is one of the issues that we have been warning about.
And at times, you know, in your previous shows, I have touched on this issue right here, warning your audience that the cost of beef in the United States is going to soar.
And some of the biggest issues that we're facing, such as hay shortages and lack of grazing access, you know, the U.S. government going after our water rights and our private property rights.
This has all contributed to the cost of beef skyrocketing.
We have been, I mean, honestly, we've been a net importer since about 2022.
And if importing more beef were the solution, we would have lower beef prices at the grocery store.
We don't.
We have record high prices.
So the only way, in answer to your question, the only way to get beef prices down at the grocery store is to support us cattle ranchers in growing the domestic herd, supply and demand.
So it sounds like government regulations are the number one issue that cattle ranchers are dealing with.
And it makes it harder and harder for them to make a profit the more they're dealing with these regulatory burdens and tax burdens.
Yes, that's sorry.
I always get it this time of year.
I apologize.
I have horrible allergies during harvest season.
So it's not, yes, regulatory burden and the cost of regulations is a huge part of what we're dealing with.
Since the 1950s, we have had such a massive increase in regulatory burden.
For example, in the 1950s, we were looking at maybe 50,000 regulations before an ounce of beef reached your plate.
Today, we're looking at well over 200,000 different regulations.
This is a statistic that I've heard over and over and over again.
And I mean, honestly, from the Federal Meat Inspection Act to the FDA to the Clean Water Act to, I mean, even down to, you know, humane solder rules, for example, we have regulatory agencies that have intervened at literally every stage of the food processing and food supply pipeline.
So it's not just the cost of regulatory intervention, but it is the hollowing out of our farmers and ranchers as we have increasingly imported meat and meat products from countries that do not have these same regulatory burdens.
So it is, of course, much less expensive for the Packers, for example, or the Feeders Association to bring in what we call grind from, say, Mexico or Central America or Brazil even, because these ranchers, they don't have to meet the same regulatory burdens that we do.
And so the beef is a lot cheaper to bring in from countries that don't have those same sort of marketplace barriers.
And then there's also just the lack of processing capacity in general.
We have seen a massive consolidation of processing all across the United States.
In fact, there's a campaign right now on the Save Our Food and Farms website that lists 50 different ways that America is losing its food and farms, and specifically how it's losing its farmers.
So, I mean, this is not just a one-sided issue, Owen.
This is a multi-faceted issue.
It has been growing now for decades, and it's now just sort of erupting onto the scene after multiple different market shocks have brought us to this point.
Is it different if you take your beef to a farmer's market?
Do you have less regulatory burden if you take it to a farmer's market versus trying to get it on the shelves of a grocery store?
Well, yes and no, it depends.
It really depends on the state.
It depends on where that beef has been processed.
You know, you're going to find that beef at a farmer's market is going to be a lot more expensive, for example, than beef you're going to find in the grocery store.
Of course, you're paying for a few different things there, but you cannot.
So just let me back up here.
It is illegal to sell red meat in commerce in the United States unless it has gone through a USDA inspected facility.
Now, there's only a few sort of caveats to that, which are state-inspected meat and poultry programs.
So technically here in South Dakota, I can have beef processed at a state inspected facility, and I could sell that potentially at a farmer's market, but that cost is going to be a little bit more expensive for the consumer.
There's one other caveat, which is called a herd share agreement.
And at the beef initiative, this is what we encourage people to do, which is buy a share of their cow.
Get to know your cow.
This is actually not only the safest in terms of hygienic considerations, but also the only way to really know that you are getting the meat that is on the farm that you're watching being raised the way that you want it to be raised, for example.
You become a owner in a share of that cow.
So when that cow is actually taken to processing, say, at a custom exempt facility, which is far less expensive to process at, by the way, than a state or fully federally inspected facility, then you not only have one cow entering the process and one cow exiting the process, you have sole chain of command.
You know exactly where that meat is coming from, but it's also, it's your meat that you, you know, you own a share in.
So you can legally have that processed however it is that you want as the owner.
You just can't sell it.
So when it comes out on the other side of a custom exempt processing facility, it literally has these big bold letters that says not for sale.
So there's a lot of regulatory nuance and quite frankly burden because there are only a limited amount of processing facilities.
So, you know, many of us have been trying to talk to state and federal lawmakers and figure out a way to expand either state, the state inspected program, for example, or like the Prime Act, for example, Thomas Massey's bill that's been reintroduced and co-sponsored by Maine Representative Shelly Pingree.
This bill, for example, would allow, legally allow for custom-exempt meat processed at a custom-exempt facility to be sold within state lines.
That would drastically increase the processing capacity and it would allow us to be able to sell meat like out of our freezer, for example.
We would be able to sell at farmers markets and, you know, our local community would have access to fresh farm-raised beef, for example.
You know, this is one thing that I've been hearing.
And I do want to eventually ask you about where the cattle ranches are at because there was a little bit of a tense moment there with President Trump and there was some sense of betrayal with what happened on the Argentina deal.
So let me kind of put it into my perspective and then get the perspective of the cattle ranchers that you're talking to.
When I see this, and I get why Trump did it, it's all pay-for-play.
He's buying Millay's loyalty.
He's buying Argentina's loyalty for whatever other plans he has for Venezuela or whatever.
So that's what I think it's really about.
But let's just put all that aside.
I look at it and they say, okay, we're going to be giving $40 billion now.
And a lot of that is supposedly to help Argentina's beef industry and bail it out.
And I hear these concerns about we don't have the inspectors, we don't have the proper processing to get to get the beef from farm to store shelves, let's say.
And people go to get their to get their beef inspected and it's a whole process and you're waiting in line.
And it's just like any other federal enterprise, right?
You go to the driver's license plate.
You're sitting there all day long.
It's torturous.
And I'm like, okay, $20 billion.
Trump expands the foreign aid to Argentina, $20 billion.
And let's just call it as it is.
What could $20 billion do for that issue?
What could $20 billion injected into the beef industry in America solely to make sure that we have more inspection plants so that we can have shorter lines, shorter wait times, quicker processing?
What could $20 billion injected into the U.S. beef economy do?
Would it make a difference?
Could it solve the problem?
Could you actually fill these roles and get new facilities and speed up the process?
Well, sure, absolutely.
However, my solution, rather than importing, you know, fed lot beef, for example, from Argentina, I would love to see that.
And I think the 20 billion is for a currency swap.
But whatever money goes down to Argentina to import, I think Argentina has phenomenal Angus genetics.
And, you know, with the climate being so close to that of our own here in the upper Midwest, for example, we could actually import live cattle and completely bypass the New World screw worm outbreak that's raging through Central America.
I mean, personally, I think the Trump administration has a real opportunity here.
And I would love to see them jump on this by working out, you know, a trade deal that helps us build our herd here.
And they could easily do that.
If we're already importing cattle, we're already importing, you know, and some of this is live cattle.
Let's just import younger cattle, you know, yearlings and heifers and, you know, good breeding stock bulls, for example, and introduce them into U.S. herds to help expand not only our genetics, but to expand our numbers.
This would help build the U.S. domestic herd and bring down prices long term.
So honestly, Argentina provides a strategic long-term opportunity for us.
And I would love to see the Trump administration jump on that as opposed to bringing in, you know, fed lot beef.
Does this fall under the purview of Brooke Rollins?
Is this something that she should be paying attention to?
I think she could certainly guide the process.
And, you know, in terms of the $20 billion, I think that's actually kind of under the Treasury's purview, from my understanding.
It's a currency swap.
And the concept is to either supplant or get the Chinese out of the region or kind of remove some of their influence in the region.
Now, again, I'm not a foreign policy, it is not in my wheelhouse.
That is definitely not my.
So then who would the beef lobbyists go to?
Let's say the president is out of the office.
What administration do they go to to try to get a word in?
Well, certainly now that would fall under Brooke Rolling's purview.
And certainly she has had a ton of pressure from not only the feeders associations, but then also the Packers to open the southern border.
So that's kind of where we're seeing this balancing act occur, which is that we need to be able to import cows if we're going to meet the demands that is in the United States.
And currently we're not capable of doing that with a 75-year low within our herds.
And so I think the Trump administration is looking at what options it has without opening the southern border.
And I have been saying this for a while now.
The New World Screw Worm fly facilities that they have announced are going to take some years to build and to have fully functioning.
There's no way that the Packers and the feeders are going to sit around and wait for two to three years with that border closed.
So, you know, I have huge concerns about this.
And I think that the Trump administration is trying to get ahead of those concerns by finding ways around the outbreak.
And I know that's kind of a diplomatic way of looking at it.
While I understand that many are very frustrated in our industry, there is some strategy to what they're doing right now.
Well, I want to get to the frustration in a second, but I also wonder, it's like anything you want to inject, anything you want to properly stimulate with a cash injection with proper oversight and guidance, I think can be effective, right?
So, okay, we need more processing plants.
We need more inspectors, something to speed up the process, something to get the process going and the cattle to the shelf, let's say, in a much more efficient, effective way.
Is this something that is there like a private sector option here?
Because I look at certain products.
You know, one good example is there's a private sector move that happened about 10 to 20 years ago against GMO foods.
There was no real government oversight of this.
The government wasn't warning you about GMOs.
Basically, the lobbyists were able to kind of just put that under the rug.
And so you didn't know if the product you were buying at the store was GMO or not.
And then Project Non-GMO comes around and they basically work in the private sector to say, hey, a lot of people are looking for non-GMO products.
You can work with us.
We can put our label on it.
We'll work to make sure it's trusted.
And now people will go to the store.
And if it doesn't have that label on it, they won't buy it.
Can you do something similar with the beef industry?
Because look, we all want to, we all want to, you know, I'm not some, hey, I want zero government.
I'm not an anarchist.
Like, if we can have an effective and efficient system to making sure that the beef that gets to the shelf is safe for people to consume and everybody feels good about it, then that's great.
Is there some way the private sector can get involved into this?
And we can kind of maybe ease some of the stress on the federal government to regulate this and have a trusted label in the private sector to say, hey, okay, maybe it's not USDA inspected, but it's something over here that people trust just as much or maybe even more.
I think that's a phenomenal solution.
And personally, I always think that the private sector does everything better than the public sector.
I would love to see the federal government work with us on, at least on the regulatory side.
But for now, the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act, for example, regulate how, and that those laws give sole jurisdiction and authority to FSIS, which is the Federal Safety Inspection Service, in terms of how any meat product is labeled.
So as much as I would love to have a select reserve label offered by the private sector, FSIS still has to approve it and sign off on it and figure out what that standard would look like.
For now, there is one solution that I have been kicking around with colleagues, which is the idea of the federal government, pardon me, this administration working with the states to expand what is called the meat and poultry inspection program.
So these are, there are 29 states that currently operate state inspected processing facilities.
And there are currently 10 out of those 29 states that have what is called an interstate or excuse me, a cooperative interstate agreement.
And if this administration just merely worked with the other 19 of those 29 states to expand the cooperative interstate agreement, we could have state inspected facilities approved by FSIS to ship interstate.
In large part, this would bypass the consolidation of the few federally inspected facilities that are mainly owned by just four Packers at this point.
So it would broaden up, or excuse me, it would greatly broaden and expand our processing capacity almost overnight.
So the drama that we saw, the tension that we saw, there was a lot of media attention to this.
There were a lot of headlines about people in the beef industry and the cattle ranchers feeling a little betrayed was one of the words that we saw a lot, betrayed by the Trump administration.
How much of that was legitimate versus just people looking and fishing for negative headlines about Trump?
Was there some real beef there?
I think that there's always contention and frustration, and especially right now, because, you know, look, let's face it, we're losing 63 family farms per day.
We're losing about 2,000 acres of farmable, arable croplands every single day in the United States.
Ranchers and farmers.
Statistic, that seems like a pretty serious number.
It is drastic.
Absolutely drastic.
I would say it's a crisis at this point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We are right there, pretty much right where we were in the 1980s all over again.
You know, and in the 1980s, livestock really, not just livestock, but the ability to diversify operations really saved many family farms.
Unfortunately, this time around, there's this simultaneous sort of war on the cow.
And so we've got these monocroppers that have been drastically subsidized by the previous administration.
They have overproduced corn and soy.
Now they have no market.
And there's really not a way for them to diversify with cattle to help save their operations right now.
And they're hurting.
They are really struggling.
So, you know, and in the last five years, over 50% of farmers and ranchers have lost money.
They have lost farm income.
So they're not just not making money.
They're losing money on their operations.
And in fact, at this point, farmers and ranchers are working two to three jobs just to keep the lights on.
And honestly, Owen, we've been kind of reduced to hobbyists at this point.
Like America's food producers aren't making any money.
We're doing it because we love it.
And so it's almost kind of a hobby as if, you know, backbreaking work is just fun.
And it's not, we're just trying to hold on to our farms at this point and their family legacies.
And it's almost like a perfect storm because a lot of people, I think, are being priced out of beef, right?
And so now you're thinking, how do you thread that needle of keeping the consumers, you know, keeping beef affordable for the consumers versus, hey, I still have to make a profit, you know, it's like that's kind of the needle that needs to be thread here.
And, you know, somebody's making a profit because we're only seeing about 15.9 cents on every dollar spent on the market.
It looks like the meatpackers are making quite a pretty profit.
You guys are paying through the roof.
So somebody is making a killing right now.
Cargill, for example, just posted record earnings in Q1.
So they're doing phenomenal.
You know, it's us and it's the consumers that are being squeezed out.
So I think, honestly, one solution is just to skip the middleman altogether.
Go directly to your rancher and boycott that centralized pain point.
You said Cargill.
Cargill.
Yep.
Wait, what is it?
What is it now?
Cargill.
It's they just posted, you know, record earnings in there.
I'm plugging that on my, I'm plugging that on my thing here to look into that.
So, okay, I hear this stuff.
And I know that you're not a foreign policy person, but this is just, I can't help it.
This is where my mind goes.
And this is why I am, I've become such a foreign policy hawk.
I think the longer I stick around in the political media, the more of a foreign policy hawk I become.
And this is exactly why this should be a priority, right?
The things that you're talking about right here, like we should be prioritizing farmers, cattle ranchers, family farms.
We should be trying to do as much for American agriculture as physically possible.
And it's just like every time I turn around, another foreign country gets tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid.
And I'm just like, I'm sick to my stomach over it.
It's like, why you could argue American farmers are the backbone of this country and have been since its foundation.
You could argue it.
You could argue that the American farmers have been the backbone, a cornerstone, a support column for the entire country.
And it's like they're struggling more than ever right now.
Who's giving them aid?
Who's focusing on them?
Who's prioritizing them?
It seems like every time I turn around, some foreign country, some foreign war, some foreign aid always gets prioritized.
I know that's not your thing.
That's my thing.
I'm this foreign policy hawk.
And I hear stories like this, and I'm saying, this is why I hate foreign aid.
This is why I'm such a foreign policy hawk, because it seems like every time some foreign country needs us to cut a check, we have tens of billions of dollars.
And then I have to turn around and look inward, and our farmers are struggling.
Our cattle ranchers are struggling.
We should, it should be in this is an in this is a complete reversal of what we should be doing.
We should be supporting our people before we support these foreign countries.
But that's my foreign policy hawkishness.
So, so before I let you go here, a more fun, let's say, less, less stressful question.
So, I noticed this.
I'm a big steak connoisseur.
Okay.
I like going out.
I like trying a bunch of different steaks.
And there's this new thing that I see happening in American steakhouses.
And that's this idea of an American YGU.
Okay.
They got this Texas YU, got this.
None of it's good, by the way.
I just got to say, if you go to a steakhouse and it has something else that's not Japanese YGU, quite frankly, probably Japanese A5 YGU.
I don't think any of it's nothing really stands up to that standard.
Is this just like, is this a racket?
I feel like this is some sort of a marketing ploy so that you pay double for your steak.
Is there something to American YGU, or is this just a branding thing to make you pay more for it?
Because I feel like every time I try some new YGU that's not Japanese A5, I feel like I've been had.
That's that's funny.
So I don't know if it's necessarily a marketing ploy for extra money.
I think what we're really trying to do in the United States is encourage more animal fats.
And that's one of the biggest problems.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons why we're getting priced out by lean cuts and lean trimmings from other nations, because we grow really quality, nice fat cattle here in the United States.
And since the nutritional guidelines, for example, had prioritized things like corn oils and hydrogenated oils, saturated, right?
And said that saturated fats were bad.
When actually now we know they're incredibly important for your brain.
These fats are actually brain food, right?
We have had a big problem getting rid of lard and cattle fat.
And so I think the wagu push is potentially part of a larger push to really support U.S. ranchers and put that fat to good use.
So things like tallow, for example, anybody who is cooking with tallow knows the benefits of tallow.
You know, people who are really starting to integrate those animal fats back into their diet, all of that helps U.S. cattle ranchers.
You know, Steak and Shake just announced that they're trying to do everything in beef tallow now.
Did you see that?
I'm so excited about that.
I'm hoping that In N Out will follow their lead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I actually got Steak and Shake actually deserves even more credit because what happened was they found out because somebody basically pre-processes the fries before they get to Steak and Shake.
And then at the actual restaurant, they fry them in beef tallow.
But what they, what they fit, what they found out was that the source that was pre-processing and cutting the fries was not using beef tallow.
So now Steak and Shake double down and they say, no, we're trying to have the whole process with beef tallow from literally the farm to when we serve it at your table at the restaurant.
So if that became the industry standard, I think two things would happen.
I think one, it would probably maybe be a nice little opportunity for cattle ranchers to kind of find a new way to maybe find a way to earn income.
But it was also, it would be so much healthier.
It would be so much healthier for the American people to consume that instead of the vegetable oils and all the other crap that they cook this crap in that's making everybody fat and stupid.
So maybe Steak and Shake changes the game like that.
Brianna, really, really appreciate your time.
If people want to follow your work, where is the best way to do so?
Absolutely.
So you can follow me at the Beef Initiative at beefnews.org.
But you can also follow me on X at Brianna9.
And make sure to check out our 50 Ways That We're Losing the Family Farm at sofaf.org.
That is S-O-F-A-F.org.
Thank you for your time, Owen.
All right.
Thank you.
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