Editor,

On October 16, 2025, President Trump announced that his administration was working on a plan to bring down the price of beef, which included a deal with Argentina to import more beef from them.

U.S. live cattle markets immediately responded with sharply lower live cattle prices on October 17.

Reporter Leah Douglas (Reuters) quoted U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins as saying at the Ag Outlook Forum, held in Kansas City, Mo., in late September: “We have no…plans to offer any payment to beef producers. We see how the government getting involved can completely distort the markets. And so currently there will be no plan, no plan is even under consideration, to insert ourselves through payments into the beef cattle industry.”

There is a long history of public officials not wanting to “insert” the government into the “marketplace” to ensure fair prices for American farmers. After all, according to them, that would be “market distorting” or even “trade distorting.”

Oh, really? Does not this new deal with Argentina constitute the government’s “inserting” itself into the beef industry? The President’s comments have already distorted the beef markets.

The federal government is continually “inserting” itself into agriculture.

Does not the recent National Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) Pricing Formula Hearing (Hearing) just implemented in 2025, which authorized taking more money out of the dairy farmers’ pockets, by federal edict, and gave that money to the processors, by federal edict, constitute the government’s “inserting” itself into dairy?

Along the same lines, the government most definitely “inserted” itself into dairy when, back in 2000, it imposed, through “bloc-voting” by the dairy co-ops, ruinous, Farm Bill-driven, anti-dairy farmer “end-product pricing” into the FMMO’s federal “Order Reform” milk-pricing “formula” that determines milk prices dairy farmers get paid.

What about the federal government’s “inserting” itself into the Dairy Margin Coverage Program (DMC), trade “agreements,” Farm Bills, mandatory checkoffs, and even federal Dietary Guidelines?

What about the USDA’s running interference on behalf of the dairy co-ops so that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) could not complete its report on the effects of market concentration in dairy?

What about FDA’s policy of “discretionary enforcement,” which has allowed “innovative” dairy products and plant-based products to be labelled as “milk” in obvious violation of FDA’s own statutory “standards of identity”?

What about the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) refusal to enforce anti-monopoly and anti-monopsony laws in agriculture?

For at least 50 years, the federal government has been “inserting” itself into agriculture, proclaiming to be “helping” American farmers, while, in reality, the government has been actively involved in the accelerated collapse of the traditional family farming system of agriculture while replacing it with a globalistic, corporate-controlled, hyper-industrialized system of agriculture. This has been done through secretly negotiated trade “deals,” the bipartisan tool of destruction called “Farm” Bills, nefarious government statutes, and the willful denial of appropriate marketplace protections for independent farmers and ranchers.

Our nation’s food security is at risk with a projected $49 billion trade deficit in agriculture this year. The political solution? Import more to lower farmgate prices and drive more family farmers and ranchers out of business!

Sincerely,