With Mike's permission, we wanted to repost his article because we feel it is so important for consumers to know how the industry has evolved.
Guest blog and photo by: Mike Callicrate at nobull.mikecallicrate.com
JBS, the biggest meat company in the world, has a problem with excess carcass trimmings, a really big and growing problem that threatens everyone’s food security.
Without sufficient demand for ground beef, whole animal slaughter operations struggle. This is true for any size meatpacker, from the smallest local plant and butcher shop to the biggest meat company in the world.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Iowa Beef Processors had the same problem. It was so big it threatened to bankrupt the company. They had already found a way to push their boxed beef into New York City and the surrounding region — the biggest beef eating market in America — by cutting a deal with the New York meat mafia to bribe retail executives and union bosses into switching from whole animal carcasses to boxed beef.
Until then, retailers had been happy with their whole animal high-quality butcher shops and their skilled butchers cutting carcasses into fresh retail meat counters. With well trained butchers breaking carcasses into everything from steaks, ground beef to hot dogs, head cheese, and bologna, they could fully utilize the whole carcass, including the trim.
Once the deal was made to pay the mafia fifty cents per hundredweight on all boxed beef going into the region, IBP went on a “death march” (as described by the Wall Street Journal) eliminating the Midwestern meatpackers selling whole carcasses and their skilled butchers. But then another problem arose – the big retailers, having traded their skilled butchers for boxed beef, decided to buy what they could easily cut and sell with lower cost labor: steaks and roasts from the boxed primal parts of the carcass, leaving IBP with freezers full of the less attractive portions, including the beef trim.
Enter Hughes Bagley, a retail meat expert hired by IBP. In seeing the predictable retailer cherry picking, Hughes developed the “Cattle Pack” program that encouraged retailers to buy the high demand and low demand parts of the carcass at discounted prices, filling IBP’s bank account instead of its freezers. This strategy literally saved the company and eliminated their beef trim problem. Added relief came with the rapid growth in demand for fast-food burgers.
Now fast-forward to today. The current administration announces 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trim will be dumped into the U.S. beef market. Where will that much lean beef trim come from? Consider the lean trim from a non-fed animal amounts to around 50 pounds per head. This is the trim, not the larger parts of the animal sold as primals at higher prices. Quick math shows this much trim would require 13.2 million cattle, an amount equal to nearly half of the 29.8 million cattle slaughtered annually in the United States.
The only way this number makes sense is when you consider the international scale and scope of a company like JBS. The reason JBS has an over-abundance of trim is because they’ve been losing critical markets. China has essentially shut off imports from JBS’s Australian operations to make its domestic livestock sector more self-sufficient. The European Union suspended meat imports from Brazil due to lack of sanitary and food safety standards. Further raising the specter of unsafe beef, China is rejecting beef from Argentina for chloramphenicol antibiotic residue.
Beef trim is where pathogens are most likely to occur. Much of the trim from the big plants goes to cooking or Advanced Meat Recovery (AMR) such as Pink Slime, added to frozen products, not so much to the fresh ground beef consumers see in retail meat counters.
The 660,000 million pounds of imported trim will not only destroy the market and any hope of staying in business for cattle producers and small domestic processors but will not lower the price of beef for consumers. Whether President Trump knows it or not, he’s bailing JBS out of a big problem, a problem of their own making, a problem similar to IBP’s decades ago.
Trump’s executive order, announced immediately after a personal White House visit by JBS owner Joesley Batista, is a $2 billion dollar gift to the criminal Brazilian family. Already within days of the announcement, cattle market and balance sheet losses to U.S. cattlemen added up to $43 billion (86 million head total cattle and calf inventory x $500/head.) These losses accrued now and in the futues as additional profits to JBS and the other big meatpackers and retailers.
Once the imports arrive, these shiploads of frozen mystery meat will quickly lose their identity at the industrial breakers and grinders, on their way to becoming fast food, military meals, school lunches, food for rest homes and hospitals, cheap big-box chubs, and TV dinners.
If the administration truly wants to rebuild the cattle herd making the U.S. food system secure and resilient, it will rescind the purchase of the 300,000 metric tons of beef trim now and target new tariffs on beef at levels equal to or greater than the U.S. cost-of-production. How do we compete with rainforest destruction for grazing and a Brazilian gaucho salary between $3,000 to $6,000 per year?
What can be done:
- We don’t need more studies. Congress can re-implement Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) on all beef and pork now.
- Producers already have the ability for direct-to-consumer sales. They need markets that will allow them to be cattle producers, not meat salesmen.
- USDA can prioritize all meat purchasing to small local/regional slaughter plants now, incentivizing existing and new local/regional plant expansion.
- The Packers and Stockyards rules, dismissed by both Trump administrations, can be implemented now, helping restore the producers share of the consumer beef dollar.
- USDA, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have all the evidence they need from the many private antitrust actions and trading records to end the corruption and begin the breakup of the concentrated power from meatpacking to retail and food service. And they can start now.
If we want to conduct more studies, as Trump’s recent executive order directs, let’s look at how America will eat without domestic beef production. What will rural America look like?
See Trump’s Oval Office meeting with cattle industry representatives: https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-signs-executive-orders-sep-4-2026/
Related: https://news.mikecallicrate.com/why-did-trump-order-up-660-million-pounds-of-mystery-meat/
All contents and sources shared from the original article: https://nobull.mikecallicrate.com/2026/09/06/imported-beef-trim-benefits-meatpackers-retailers-and-food-service-but-hurts-producers-and-consumers/
