STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Cattle ranchers say they are finally recovering from five years of drought, wildfires and supply chain disruptions. Ranchers are doing better thanks to high prices for beef. Good for ranchers, less than ideal for consumers, who've been complaining of high prices. President Trump promised voters he would bring down prices immediately upon taking office, which didn't happen. And he's now talking of boosting the supply with imported beef. NPR's Kirk Siegler checked in with ranchers who have opinions about this.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Since President Trump took office and started a second trade war, American farmers are paying a lot more for fertilizer and equipment and getting a lot less when they sell their crops. But if you're in the cattle business, like Spencer Black (ph), you're a rare bright spot.
SPENCER BLACK: We have been due for prices like this. It's given us a chance to breathe. We've been able to update equipment. We've been able to pay down some debt.
SIEGLER: Black ranches on the Snake River Plain in Idaho. A 50% jump in beef prices since 2020 means his family ranch and feedlot can stay in business. Across the country, more than 150,000 cattle ranches have gone under since 2017. But here's the problem for Black. He says the high price of cattle is also making it hard for the industry to build back.
BLACK: That's one of the issues that we're facing is we have these high prices, guys are jumping out. Young people can't afford to get in right now because the prices are so high.
SIEGLER: President Trump campaigned on bringing grocery prices down, but he also wants to keep rural America happy. It's a big part of his base. A couple weeks ago, the administration announced a, quote, "plan for American ranchers and consumers," promising bigger disaster relief payments and cheaper loans for young people trying to get into the business. Here's Trump's Ag secretary, Brooke Rollins, on Fox Business.
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BROOKE ROLLINS: You think about the last administration, they were working to get cattle off the lands. They didn't like cattle. They were worried about climate change and methane emissions from our cattle industry. And this president has worked so hard.
SIEGLER: Now, Trump also wants to open up millions of new acres of publicly owned rangeland for grazing. Jason Banegas is a livestock economist at New Mexico State University.
JASON BANEGAS: The problem is, just because there's more grazing doesn't mean that there's going to be more cattle, though.
SIEGLER: Banegas says the grazing expansion is mostly in the arid West, which can't support cattle in big enough numbers to significantly grow the American beef supply. So ranchers are still tempted to sell the cows they have now while prices are high.
BANEGAS: If you open up grazing, you still have to make some incentive for ranchers to hold onto some of those cattle, to keep them in their breeding stock rather than selling them.
SIEGLER: A couple of days after his plan for ranchers was released, President Trump then announced he's going to import more beef from Argentina to bring prices down. Ranchers felt blindsided.
CAMERON MULRONY: And I think from a headline standpoint, yeah, people were a little bit in shock.
SIEGLER: Cameron Mulrony is a rancher and vice president at the Idaho Cattle Association. He knows that even if Argentina sends all the beef it can to the U.S., it's just a fraction of the overall market. That won't bring beef prices down. But Trump even talking about it caused cattle markets to waver. Things are tense and on edge in the heartland right now.
MULRONY: It only takes one, you know, we call them black swan events - like COVID, right? - that just come out of the blue and directly impact your market.
SIEGLER: For now, ranchers are just trying to cope with uncertainty. Here's a little of the chess game Spencer Black is playing. He's just finished moving his heifers home for the winter from U.S. Forest Service land up in the mountains.
BLACK: I got them calves down here on a ration instead of keeping them up on the ranch for a couple of months and just punching hay in them.
SIEGLER: He's decided not to buy any new heifers for now and is weighing how many to keep to grow his herd. What he doesn't want more of are what he calls knee jerks in the market due to the politics of beef prices, which ranchers don't set.
BLACK: I do know it'll come back down eventually. It will. If we let the market system work, it will level out.
SIEGLER: Still, right now Black says ranchers are making more money than they did a few years ago, and that's a good thing.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Boise.
(SOUNDBITE OF DEAD MEADOW SONG, "AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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