Written by Anna Kleiber Lincoln Journal Star
York News-Times Reprint
| Nebraska’s all-Republican federal delegation slammed President Donald Trump’s decision to exempt 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef from tariffs for three months in an effort to lower prices ahead of the Midterm election. Trump announced the deal in a social media post Friday, saying it will “substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families” by allowing the beef to be imported without an “out-of-quota tariff” in the next 90 days. “We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices,” the president wrote. “This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again.”Beef prices are at a record high as the U.S. sees a historically small cattle herd size caused, in part, by rising input costs and persistent droughts in key cattle-producing states like Nebraska. The average price of ground beef per pound was $6.89 in July, up from $6.25 per pound in July 2025 and $5.50 per pound in July 2024, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shared by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Trump did not say what countries the beef would come from or which ones had committed to selling at a below-market rate. In response to Trump’s announcement, U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer said in a social media post she is “extremely disappointed” by the decision, saying it will hurt U.S. beef producers. “We all want lower grocery prices, but as I’ve said for months, we cannot do it at the expense of American producers. Flooding the market with foreign beef hurts our livestock industry and undermines the long-term solution: growing the U.S. cattle herd to meet demand,” Fischer said. U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts echoed this in his statement, saying “short term policy shifts do not equal long term solutions” and that the administration should work to support Nebraska farmers and ranchers so they can grow their herd sizes to better meet consumer demand. Rep. Mike Flood said while he agrees something should be done to lower grocery prices for families, this move “undercuts American farmers and ranchers by flooding the market with lower quality foreign beef.” “Nobody raises better beef than Nebraska ranchers, and price controls should never be used to give foreign beef a leg up over American beef,” Flood wrote on social media. In a statement Friday, Nebraska Cattlemen President Craig Uden expressed disappointment in the president’s decision to allow more foreign beef imports. “The president’s statement on Truth Social today could not have come at a worse time for producers who are making critical decisions regarding heifer retention and herd expansion,” Uden said. “Long-term market stability is imperative for herd expansion, and this type of short-term messaging hinders beef cattle producers by creating uncertainty instead of letting a cyclical market do its job. “Mark McHargue, president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau, said the deal “only creates short-term pain on feeder calf prices without long-term solutions for cattle producers.””Supply and demand aren’t a far-reaching academic concept, it is the real-world scenario our cattle industry finds itself in, and short-sighted government policy only serves to provide long-term damage to an unbelievably complex beef supply chain,” he said in a statement Friday. This story contains material from Reuters. |
