Jaime R. Luke, Michigan State University, and David L. Ortega, Michigan State University and C-FARE Board Member
Ask shoppers what stings most at the grocery store and beef tops the list. Ground beef now averages above $6 a pound, a record, and steak prices have climbed even faster. In late August, the administration responded by waiving out-of-quota tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef trimmings for 90 days. The goal of easing grocery bills is understandable. But the move exposes a basic mismatch in food and agricultural policy. Cattle biology runs on a clock measured in years, far longer than a policy response with a 90-day window.
Today's prices were years in the making. Successive droughts, high feed costs and herd liquidation have left the U.S. cattle herd at its smallest since the 1950s, with 28.5 million beef cows as of July, the fewest since USDA began tracking the series in 1971. Demand has done its part too. Americans' appetite for protein has kept beef purchases remarkably resilient even at record prices, though that resilience is starting to show cracks.
Rebuilding the herd will make the problem worse before it makes it better. Think of it as the case of the missing calf. When a rancher decides to expand, she holds back a heifer for breeding rather than selling her. That heifer never enters a feedlot, so there is less beef on the market next year, not more. And the calf she eventually raises will not reach a butcher counter for nearly three years. Multiply that decision across tens of thousands of ranches and beef supplies tighten, and prices rise, precisely because recovery has begun. The latest data show heifer retention up 3 percent from a year ago, a tentative sign that rebuilding is underway. That said, the number of heifers held for replacement in 2025 was at its lowest since the series began in 1973.
Timing is where policy collides with biology. Most spring-born calves are marketed between September and November, the same window in which the new imports will arrive. Ranchers deciding whether to keep that heifer are watching prices closely. When expanded imports were first announced last October, calf prices fell more than $40 per hundredweight in two weeks. Cheaper calves this fall may convince some producers to wait, prolonging the very shortage the policy is meant to fix.
Consumer affordability is a legitimate goal, and a temporary import window covering a small share of consumption will not derail herd recovery on its own. But the trade-off is real. Interventions that lower prices today can mute the signals that bring more supply, and durably lower prices, tomorrow. Washington can decide who supplies this fall's hamburger. Only the cattle cycle can decide when beef gets cheaper again.
The Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, the nation's pioneer land-grant university, is home to one of the top-ranked programs in agricultural and food economics.
