The Highwire with Del Bigtree - U.S. CATTLE AT 64-YEAR LOW, HORMONE RULES FUEL BEEF PRICE SURGE

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

The US cattle inventory is at a 64-year low, sending beef prices skyrocketing for consumers. The exporting of American cattle has also plummeted, partially due to the hormone-treated stateside cattle not passing the stronger food standards of some countries. Further compounding the issue, imports from Mexico have been suspended due to the detection of a dangerous flesh-eating fly that poses serious risks to both livestock and humans.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Eggs are not the only food that's costing more. If it's not one thing, it's another. Now with the price of eggs coming down, well, look at the price of beef. Beef prices are soaring. Experts say the cost has jumped over 40% of the last four years. Right now, the U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest since 1951, driving up prices due to limited supply. In February of 2021, a pound of ground beef was $3.99 cents.

Now, February 2025, 5.6. That's an increase of 41%. This latest supply shortage isn't caused by an illness. Rather, cattle ranchers blame the high cost of supplies for keeping Hurts fed and transporting cattle from the west to East Coast. Ranchers and cattle processors are facing really high costs to do business right now. And so that means the beef that we buy the grocery store is ultimately going to be more expensive. Consumers are not pushing back, spending a record $160 billion on beef products last year,

even as prices hit $8.00. per pound. That relief could be a ways off for both consumers and ranchers with experts saying it's not going to take months but years before herds nationwide can grow to where they can better meet demand. So as you heard there in the in the montage, beef cattle heads are at a 64 year low and that's USDA's own numbers and those are the headlines that are being made right now. So that's this is a big issue and we have terrain. This is an analyst company and they just put this in a graph form so you can see what we're talking about here. And you can see 1961, obviously

a low point there, and now here we are, 2025. What I find interesting about this chart is right around 1974, 1975, you see the peak, and then it starts to go down right there. That was about a year or two right before limits to growth. That's a club of Rome's report saying, look, there's too many people on the planet. We're going to have to reduce consumption. You've got to stop eating

meat and dairy. So that's interesting. There's a lot of factors, obviously, I'd go into this. But when I look at this, that's one of the things I see. And then you go to the World Economic Forum's own website in 2019. Right before the pandemic hit, they told everybody you will be eating replacement meats within 20 years. And of course, what do they mean? What they mean manufactured meats and bug proteins and things like that. So there's also been with when it comes to the climate conversation, there's been a concerted effort to reduce meat consumption. So you've got to wonder if that is factoring into this, this cycle.

All of the coaling of animals to, the bird flu stuff. I mean, all of this. stuff seems it's just we've been reporting on it we had shad Sullivan on a rancher that talks about the pressures that are coming in the costs and of course you know even the nitrogen reduction the whole greening thing making it harder grow the the grasses and things that you know that beed their food supplies so I mean the pressure is in and again again as you look at this these are complicated issues right then they're saying it's going to get it's going to take years to you know get the beef supply back up but if you just suddenly said okay no glyp the state on any farm, you know, food just going to disappear. I mean, we, you know, what do we do?

So, you know, we can't starve to death, even though it seems like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates would probably be perfectly happy with bodies pile up. Maybe we can eat the bodies that are piling up, you know, like some totally dystopian novel. Yeah, we're talking about massive infrastructure change here, massive. Right. On a scale we've never, we've never seen. I mean, this is kind of like a Manhattan project for health. That's what we're looking at. So we're looking at these. This is the end of quarter one for companies. So you have a lot of earnings calls, a lot of investor calls.

And there's a lot that can be gleaned from that. One of them is Tyson Foods. So we listen in on them. And Barclays analysts asked a question about this lower herd, these lower heads of cattle. Tyson isn't going to affect your food? And this is what they had to say. It's just Tyson Foods. They say, I think it's important to note that cattle on feed from a weight perspective are extremely heavy.

We're at record weights throughout the business as well. we're seeing some weight that is offsetting from a volume perspective, some of the lower head counts we're seeing as the supply has been obviously lower than a year ago. So really they're saying, look, I know we don't have a lot of cattle, but the ones we have, they're huge. They're bloated. We're packing full of hormones. They can barely stand.

Their legs are buckling or the weight of the size of what they are. Youhoo! Don't worry about it. Now, this speaks to the conversation we just talked about with the pesticides and the herbicides. We have economics versus health. And so there's a trade deal just a couple weeks ago that President Trump sparked with the UK. This was really a record-breaking trade deal

for good services, but also meat. And one of these conversations was from Bloomberg. They really spotlighted one of the issues with this. RFK Jr. and trade deal put US products in spotlight. So the UK government said in this trade deal, it wouldn't weaken its food standards to take US meat. So what they were saying is hormone-treated beef or is not going to enter the UK.

And you can look into this article in Bloomberg. They show a little pie chart. And it shows kind of a snapshot from the USDA's own numbers. 86.5% no hormone free claims. So it's assuming that there are using hormones on its American meat. 13.5% claim of no hormones used. So this is. This story has a couple of things that are really disturbing.

First of all, that our food supply is not accepted by other nations. Just at the very basic level, that we are not going to lower our standards because you have such low standards in America. That should just be a wake-up call for any citizen in this country who believes in American exceptionalism. We were supposed to be the best, the brightest, and we are being poisoned. That's just evidence there. Then when you look at that pie chart, if we can bring it up again, what you then recognize is, so what's going to happen is all of our exports are going to be that little yellow box. So we're not even going to get that. Here in America, that will probably go to the export because that's all that the rest of the world

will take from us. And so that means we're only going to have an option to be eating hormones, packed, giant, you know, massive bloated beef. Right. Yeah. And this is, this is, seems to be the conversation is, it's, again, with the vaccine, safe and effective, everything's fine. And you see all the rest of the country's backing off of giving these shots to kids. Same thing here. The rest of the countries seem to get something. They get it. They get it. We don't. What are we not getting? Well, when this conversation is the hormones or atrazine or giving these shots to the kids, but there's a lot of work to do. And that's what you keep spotlighting here.

There's something that's not right. We have obviously... We're so far off course. Just to course correct and get back to where the rest of the world is at, we have work to do. And so just looking at this conversation with U.S. meat, we have another issue that's kind of compounding this. And we're just putting this steak on the ground here so we can follow this story. This is Fox News. Flesh eating.

Are you ready for this? New World Screwworm. This is a fly. Fly larvae could pose health risk to cattle in humans. So we go to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. She took to X. She said this. Due to the threat of the New World Screw War,

by announcing the suspension of live cattle, horse, and bison imports through U.S. southern border ports of entry effective immediately. Mexico has a large import of meat into the United States. The last time this devastating pest invaded America, it took 30 years for our cattle industry to recover. This cannot happen again. Wow. Well, I mean, in this case, this one doesn't bother me.

As I've said, in talking to Shad, one of the big issues with the beep industry is so much of it's controlled by Brazil and South America, and they are bringing all their, you know, sort of lesser quality meats. And then we export the good stuff and we're eating the bad stuff. Maybe this is Brooks' way of sort of just, you know, without creating a trade war saying, hey, you've got a little pest problem. So you deal with that. We're going to start blocking some of that meat. I certainly love that American farmers and ranchers are going to be bad.

benefited by this. And I want to be eating, you know. I mean, look, I want the laws that Robert Kennedy Jr. and the USDA and whatever we start doing to make this, you know, a better place and our food cleaner and better, I want it going to us. And so, you know, maybe this is a step in the right direction there.