Where’s the Beef?

Florida’s Cattle Industry and Its Future

When you hear the name “Florida,” what likely springs to mind is the sunny beaches, the terrible hurricanes, and “God’s waiting room” where Boomers sink their retirement money into the well-oiled real estate empire. Not cattle.

But older than the tourism, older than the citrus, is a robust, heritage cattle ranching culture that has been vibrant since the Spanish.

Like oranges, cattle are not native to Florida. They were brought by the Spaniard Ponce De Leon in 1521 alongside horses for the settlers. The Europeans once again brought a way of life that was not even particularly common or attainable in Europe to the New World, where it took with alacrity. Despite its location in the South, Florida’s development more closely mirrors that of the Western states, with extremely limited development south of Alachua County until Henry Flagler and his Rockefeller backers poured money into the eastern spine of the state running down what is now I-95. Flagler was a railroad magnate, and his rail lines are still in use today. This mirrors to a high degree the Western states, whose development primarily came from the railroad as well, but spawned a certain pastoral way of life that America still idealizes. It does not, however, come for free.

Beef is almost definitional to the American way of life. The cheeseburger is a universal American symbol, as integral as blue jeans in expressing Americanness to the rest of the world. Florida’s beef industry generates something to the tune of $6.4 billion per year.¹ But beef, like everything else American, faces enormous pressures to outsource. Since NAFTA was passed, America has lost 20% of her ranches, and the average age of her ranchers is a concerning 58 years old.²

Florida loses just under 200,000 acres of ranchland a year, in part due to the massive influx of new residents, some 1,000 a day. As much as NAFTA and titanic development deserve blame for the state of American Ranching, there is a far more culpable party: meatpackers.

Upton Sinclair’s well-known invective against the meatpackers is credited with the 1906 creation of the Food and Drug Administration, and for turning the Theodore Roosevelt administration on to the horrible abuses of that industry. But as insane as it doubtless sounds, such efforts did not fundamentally change the stranglehold that the industry has had on beef. The five biggest meatpackers have a tighter control on beef now than they did a century ago. In 1970, ranchers got something like $0.60 for every $1 spent on steak. Today, the figure has almost dropped to half of that, with ranchers earning a mere $0.39 for every $1 spent on steak.³ Despite this, the consumer is paying considerably more than he once did.

Meatpackers are one of the largest lobbies in favor of illegal immigration, and immigration generally. They specifically lobbied against Trump’s reinstatement of the Obama-era ban on Near-Eastern countries where our ability to verify the fidelity of anything claimed by prospective “refugees” was compromised.⁴ Their use of “migrant labor” is as well-known as it is underhanded.⁵ And according to Axios, President Trump’s promised deportation scheme “would kill the industry.”⁶ These people will cynically point out how hard the conditions are for workers, while neglecting to mention that the very reason they support the current labor regime and spend significant amounts of money to keep it open is to enable them to pay said workers next to nothing. If an accident happens, no need for worker’s comp; simply give a call to ICE.⁷ It is estimated that well over half of the workers in the meatpacking industry are illegals, and many of the rest are foreigners on temporary visas.

Make no mistake, the meatpacking industry should not be opposed primarily on the grounds of its treatment of workers, but on its parasitic desire to defraud the American people to turn a buck. If you search the web, it is replete with scandals and human rights abuses complained about. They have not made an ounce of difference in the century since Sinclair’s The Jungle. If we truly want to recalibrate the United States demographically, if we truly want to end forever the issue of Immigration, then we are going to need to be willing to act hard and act fast. The meatpacking industry must be hit with antitrust legislation until it is weak in the knees, and the NGO networks that facilitate the illegal aliens entering the country must be driven to legal destruction, using every legal remedy we can muster. The Congress will likely humiliate itself in attempts to stop this, as it is up to its neck in the spiderweb of corruption of the meatpackers.⁸ Industry insider Austin Frerick, agriculture policy expert and author of the book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry has described it thus:

The meat industry is the closest we have to a criminal organization in modern day American business and the USDA just seems incompetent to deal with them.

There is no way around it — the meatpackers’ dominance is maintained by their incredible ability to keep the price of beef extremely low. This has kept beef as the American staple, and has kept Americans buying. But this is not sustainable, and its price has long been in the form of cut corners in beef quality and conditions. Now its price appears to be the survival of ranching in America, and, perhaps, the survival of America itself.

This ranchland currently serves as a pinnacle of American beauty and savagery. The American Serengeti of Central Florida has preserved the unique habitat of many animals, trees, grassland, fish, and others.⁹ It serves as a final bulwark of the land that created America as we know it. If it is sold off, it will be turned into the same suburbs and Section 8s that litter the modern American landscape. It will be full of rent-seekers, scammers, and foreigners who view this place with animal hunger in their eyes, ready to strip mine every bit of value until the land is a used-up husk.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., promises a revolution in American food’s health, and it is the sincere hope of many (including the author) that he succeeds. But if he does succeed, American beef’s price will skyrocket. There is simply no way to raise cattle in a healthy environment, free of dystopian medical innovations and the meatpacking cartel, that ends in a cheap per-pound price of beef. The American people have vested in President Trump more authority than any president in my lifetime to reform the United States, a goal he has long promised. It will ultimately be decided by his administration, whether Ranching in America survives; and if he and Kennedy decide to save Ranching as a way of life, beef will become more expensive.

But regardless of what happens in the next several years in D.C., you, dear reader, can make an impact on this space. Search out local ranchers, and buy directly, provided that you are satisfied with the conditions of their ranch. There is a cottage industry of Ranchers trying to escape the meatpacking cartel via higher-quality, more expensive beef. All the same, you may find that the price is more than worth paying.

1. Elina Shirazi, “Florida cattle ranchers blame booming population, urban sprawl for dying industry,” Fox News, April 24, 2019. (Archived: https://archive.ph/ci5a6)

2. Ibid.

3

4. https://x.com/markskrikorian/status/892526556127604737

5. Joseph Grosso, “In the Neoliberal Slaughterhouse,” Compact, April 11, 2024.

6. Alayna Alvarez and Ben Berkowitz, “Mass deportations could ‘kill’ Colorado’s meatpacking industry,” Axios Denver, December 11, 2024.

7. Marney Coleman and Grace Hermann, “COVID-19’s Effect on Domestic Farmworkers and Meat Processing Workers,” ERB Institute, University of Michigan. (Link to full 2021 paper here.)

8. John McCracken, “Meat industry increases political spending, lobbying as USDA updates crucial regulations,” Missouri Business Alert, June 6, 2024.

9. “Cattle and the Environment: Leading the Way in Conservation,” Beef – It’s What’s for Dinner.