The Real Reason Beef Costs More: Fewer Cows, Not Corporate Greed
Donald Trump and Peter Navarro are blaming meatpackers for hiking beef prices, but Agriculture Department data tell a different story.
The rising cost of living is impacting nearly every good, including beef. From December 2020 to December 2025, the average price of steak rose by over $3 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (This is about a $2-per-pound increase after adjusting for inflation.) Thanks to these higher prices, Americans are reportedly eating less beef.
These cost hikes have not gone unnoticed by President Donald Trump, who, in November, blamed meat-packers for "driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation." The president then directed the Justice Department to investigate the "Big Four" meat-packers—JBS, National Beef, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, which together control 85 percent of the meatpacking market—for violating federal antitrust law. The status of the investigation is unclear, but on Monday, Trump's top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, celebrated the president "taking on the Big Beef cartel." While it might be politically popular to blame big meat-packers for high prices, data published by Trump's own Agriculture Department undermine this narrative.
If meat-packers were really "criminally profiting at the expense of the American People," as Trump alleges, the price at which packers sell beef (the wholesale value) would increase by a greater amount than the price at which they buy beef (the farm value). That's not what's happened. Agriculture Department data show that farm, wholesale, and retail values have risen basically in tandem.
Historic and current choice beef value and price spread data are published on a monthly basis by the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Department. These data show that, in December 2020, meat-packers paid cattle farmers $2.44 per pound of unprocessed beef, which they sold to grocers for $3.33 after processing. That's a farm-to-wholesale price spread of 89 cents. By December 2025, this price spread had decreased to 27 cents while the price meat-packers pay for beef more than doubled to $5.15. This indicates meat-packers are tightening their belts, not making out like bandits. In fact, beef-packer margins have been negative since 2023 and are projected to worsen this year, reports the beef industry magazine Drovers.
It's not corporate greed that's driving up the price of beef at the grocery store; it's the fact that it's now much more expensive for meat-packers to buy beef from farms. This isn't due to cattle farmers colluding to raise prices. There are simply fewer cows.
The American beef inventory shrank from 30.9 million in January 2021 to 27.9 million in January 2025, according to the most recent Agriculture Department data. From January 2021 to January 2026, cattle and calves on feed for the U.S. slaughter market, the main indicator of the six-month supply of beef, declined by 500,000 head. This decrease is attributable to a combination of weather, disease, and reduced imports. Some factors include persistent drought on American pasture lands and the U.S. halting Mexican cattle imports in July 2025 to stave off the New World screwworm, explains the American Farm Bureau Federation's Bernt Nelson.
Beef supply may be down, but Americans' appetite for it is not. There are some ways to drive down retail prices—like exempting beef imports from tariffs and allowing small-scale ranchers to process and sell their own beef locally—but spending millions of dollars on a federal antitrust suit against American meat-packers isn't one of them.
