Questions remain about the possible expansion of the U.S. beef herd given the incredibly tight beef supplies.
R-CALF USA CEO Bill Bullard said the increasing reliance on foreign beef imports has made it more difficult to grow the U.S. herd.
“So, what has happened over time is we have been systematically displacing domestic production of beef in the United States. We have eliminated opportunities for cattle producers. We’ve eliminated opportunities to increase our herd size, and the way we did that was to become increasingly dependent on foreign sources for beef. If we go back a little over a generation ago, to 1980, for example, only about 11 percent of the beef consumed in America was sourced from foreign countries.”
Bullard said the percentage of foreign beef imports has jumped dramatically since then.
“Today, we’ve more than doubled that percentage. About 22 percent of the beef consumed in America is beef from any one of the 20 countries that we now import from, including Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. There are 20 countries that we are now sourcing beef from, and that has displaced domestic production here and has caused us to have an increased dependency on these foreign countries.”
Bullard says relying on other countries for beef or any other kinds of food opens up the U.S. food supply to all kinds of problems outside of American control.
“There could be geopolitical problems that could disrupt the supply chain and prevent the timely entry of foreign beef, and disease outbreaks, like we’re experiencing a pest outbreak with respect to the New World Screwworm, have now disrupted those dependencies that we have relied upon. So, what we must do as a nation is we must reach a level of self-reliance in beef production, and the only way to do that is to begin to manage the import flow into this country-the very flow that has caused us to dismantle our domestic industry.”
bullard4 :35 OC…”highly centralized.”
“We’ve actually lost over 50 percent of all the cattle producers that were in business just over a generation ago. They are gone today. And with them, they took about nine-and-a-half million mother cows from our U.S. cattle herd. When the cattle industry began to contract, we soon saw an important integral part of our supply chain, and that is the feedlot sector, begin to contract at an alarming pace. We’ve lost 86,000 in the independent feedlots, primarily family-scale feedlots, across the country. So, the industry is becoming highly concentrated and highly centralized.”
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