What In The World Is Going On With the Beef Industry?

The beef packing industry is broken.

4 major companies own over 80% of the packing plants in the United States, and 2 of them are foreign-owned.

100 years ago, the Packers and Stockyard Act broke up the major monopolies dominating the cattle and packing industry at the time, but 100 years later, we are at the same place again.

We here at Cunningham Pastured Meats are not as dependent on the cattle market and packing industry as we used to be, but it still affects our cattle ranch, our neighbors, our community, and in the end, the consumer. 

The small family ranch is one of the last holdouts of the consolidation of the farming/ranching industry. There are still many FAMILY OWNED cattle ranches in the west, but they are becoming rarer as margins become razor-thin. The cost of raising cattle continues to rise, yet the price of cattle has not risen at the same time. This is largely blamed on the large packing plants that control the industry's end product and are working together to artificially keep cattle prices low while still increasing prices to the end consumer.

Even though we have made more direct-to-consumer sales, it is still a very tiny percentage of all beef sales in the United States. Also, USDA laws make it difficult for small producers to open small-scale processing plants due to overwhelming regulation and costs that the average small producer cannot justify.

Another part of this problem is that the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) is no longer in place, and meat brought in from out of the country can still be labeled as "Product of USA" even if the cattle were raised their entire life in another country and were slaughtered or packaged in America. We raise the best beef in the world, yet we have thousands of cattle a week being imported from outside country's that can be labeled as "Product of USA" (see my article here about misleading labels on meat). 

Our mission is to be transparent about everything we do in our business, to build trust, and keep you informed as a consumer.

We understand that this is why you choose Cunningham Pastured Meats as your trusted source for meat, but as stated above, this affects several layers of people and not just our business alone.