Where Your Beef Comes From Matters More Than Ever

There is a lot of noise surrounding beef right now.  Here is what we know, what it means for consumers, and why buying directly from a producer gives you something the grocery store often cannot: certainty. 

Here are reasons for the clanging over beef:

1. Because of higher domestic prices the US is going to import 300,000 metric tons (about 660 million lbs.) of ground beef.  While the announcement did not name the supplying countries, we know imports come from Brazil, Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.  Since the Country-of-Origin label is no longer required we are left in the dark as to the source. 

X (Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook are bulging at the seams with posts from angry consumers who are highly agitated with the very idea of importing ground beef.  Here are a few comments - “I’m not eating beef again” and “The thought of importing ground beef is disgusting” and the list goes on. 

Importing beef is a decades-long practice, not a novel idea.  As a consumer and producer I’m certainly not in support of it.  None-the-less, grocery stores and supermarkets have been selling us that “disgusting” stuff for years.

2.  On Monday the US opened a new port of entry in Arizona to bring Mexican beef into the US.  This decision is a conflicting development.  The USDA is spending $750 million to build a facility that will produce about 300 million sterile screwworms each week in Texas, but the facility won’t be operational until late 2027 at the earliest.   

These developments do not mean that imported cattle or processed beef should automatically be considered unsafe.  They do, however, highlight how complex today’s beef supply chain has become. 

For consumers who want greater certainty about where their food comes from, one of the simplest solutions is to know your producer.

When you buy beef directly from us, you know where it was raised, who raised it, and the standards behind it.  That level of transparency is something we believe matters now more than ever.