Why Can’t Ranchers Sell Meat Directly to Consumers? by Heather Smith Thomas
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discriminatory regulations because we don’t allow a state-inspected beef plant to ship across state lines, even though that state-inspected plant essentially does the same thing as the federally-inspected meat plants,” he says. “Even though we don’t have federal inspectors in foreign packing plants (Brazil, Australia, etc.) we allow foreign beef to cross our border and then go anywhere in the U.S. The state-inspected plants are thus being discriminated against and held back from competing in the national market. They are limited to their state market, which limits the size of their operation. If they wanted to engage in interstate commerce, they had to meet stringent regulations that didn’t even apply to the smaller operations,” Bullard says. “We have been trying to address this for over a decade. In the 2008 Farm Bill we succeeded in getting a provision to allow state-inspected meat plants to ship beef across state lines, but the USDA wrote the regulations in a manner that was so cumbersome that very few states could comply. So the problem persisted.” Then the COVID pandemic hit, and for the first time in our lifetimes, consumers who went to the grocery store could not buy the food they needed for their families. This raised more alarm signals.
anchers and consumers have been frustrated in the past several decades with growing regulations that impede direct marketing. Every community used to have local meat markets and butchers; there was always access to locally-grown meat. Today America’s consumers no longer have this source; all meat has to be state inspected if states have inspection systems, and to cross state lines it has to be federally inspected, and there’s a shortage of federal inspectors; they only service the large packing plants. This issue dramatically became apparent during the COVID pandemic in early 2020 when meat was unavailable and/or very high priced at grocery stores and consumers were trying to find alternative places to buy it. Many producers had beef animals they couldn’t sell, and consumers had no dependable source of beef. How did this huge disconnect evolve? Bill Bullard, R-CALF USA (RanchersCattlemen Action Legal Fund) says that back in the 1980s there were hundreds of meat ROADBLOCKS TO SELLING DIRECT TO packers who distributed meat across the U.S. CONSUMERS and hundreds of thousands more cattle proWe currently have a huge shortage of cusducers—and tens of thousands more feedlots, tom butchers across rural America; there’s and hundreds more local auction yards. “We had a very robust disaggregated sys- usually a waiting list to get an animal butchtem that could continue to operate even in ered. “America is just now realizing this, even the face of a crisis. Even if there was a crisis though this shortage has been in existence in one area of the country, we had enough packers and processers to pick up the slack for the past two decades,” says Bullard. “Congress, and all of the trade associations from other areas,” he says. “Then through the 1980s and into the early were inattentive, and now they are forced 1990s we went through what even the USDA to address the issue, and they are doing described as merger-mania. The largest pack- so—which is very promising. We need more ers were merging and acquiring smaller and custom butchers, and more packers, which mid-sized packers. Then they centralized the means more competition,” he explains. This packing industry in the high plains region of may be the silver lining in the black cloud of the U.S.—basically six states. So we have the COVID pandemic. “Also, when consumers went to the beef about 75 percent of our packing capacity and about 80 percent of our feedlots all located in cases at the grocery store and found them Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, western empty, it made them wonder where their Iowa and Minnesota, and eastern Colorado. beef was coming from. This created a revival in demanding mandatory country of origin Everything now is centralized,” he explains. There are federal regulations in effect to labeling. In April we put a petition out on our ensure or attempt to ensure that these huge website and now have more than 393,000 packing plants are producing safe food, in a consumers and producers who signed it, calling on the president and Congress to require sanitary manner. “This takes more regulations than for mandatory county of origin labeling for all small plants, but there was no distinguishing beef, pork and dairy products sold in the between the size of the plants. Thus we have U.S. This is a positive move that has come
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Livestock Market Digest
out of the pandemic.” It seemed so illogical that there wasn’t enough beef in the grocery stores to meet the demand (and the limited supplies were high priced), and yet ranchers or feedlots couldn’t sell their animals. The system is broken. Jay Platt, a third-generation cattle rancher near Saint Johns, Arizona says there are several problems with trying to sell direct. “Our family is trying to start an e-commerce business with meat. We don’t want to just sell a half beef or whole beef; we want to use e-commerce and basically do what Amazon does. You can order from us and there will be a box show up on your doorstep—attractively packaged and exactly what you ordered,” he says. “We’ve looked at a lot of models, of people who are doing this, but the problem when you do e-commerce is that you must have a federally-inspected plant to process the meat, and there are not enough of those around the country to do it. In Arizona there is only one that does custom, federally-inspected processing—at the University of Arizona meat lab—but I am a five-hour drive from there, to get that inspection,” he says. “There are actually four federally-inspected plants in Arizona but one is owned by JBS and they don’t do custom processing. Two others are small plants that similarly do not custom process. The fourth is the University of Arizona —the federally-inspected plant that will do custom processing. We also have seven state-inspected plants, one of which is only 50 miles from me, but with state inspection we cannot ship meat across the state line,” says Platt. “There are other plants that will do a custom kill for you, but you must sell the live animal to the customer and then they have it processed. I was on a phone call with a number of people with our Arizona Department of Agriculture in mid-June to discuss this problem. Apparently there are 22 states right now that have state-inspected facilities that are trying to get regulations changed so that state inspection will enable you to cross state lines. They have not been able to get this through,” he says. “One of the fellows who was on this call runs the inspection service for Arizona for these state-inspected plants. He said that all state inspections have to follow identical standards that USDA follows. I thought this was interesting. If it’s a foreign meat packer, it has to be an equivalent standard and not an identical standard, but if it’s a state plant, it must be identical, and yet you can’t ship interstate! We are harder on our own country’s producers than we are on foreign
