U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins gave updates and addressed concerns related to the price of beef and the import of foreign beef in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News senior editor-in-chief Alex Marlow.
On the latest episode of The Alex Marlow Show, the Trump-appointed U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) chief explained the issue with cattle.
“Every year, America consumes more beef than anywhere in the world. We grow the best beef through genetics and incredible research in some of the schools, [and] we’ve got the best ranchers in the world. But, we also consume the most beef,” Rollins stated.
Citing the new-and-improved food pyramid unveiled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and herself earlier this year, Rollins explained that the protein-rich suggested diet has played a role in Americans eating “more beef now than ever before.”
According to the USDA secretary, Americans consume about 13 million metric tons of beef every year, a portion of which comes from outside the country.
“Something that a lot of your listeners may not know is that we have always imported about two to three million of that 13 million, and most of that that we’ve imported is the leaner, the ground beef, the less expensive beef,” Rollins said. “The cuts […] the steaks and the filets — that’s usually almost always beef that we grow in America. But we have long-imported ground beef.”
Addressing President Donald Trump’s August announcement that the U.S. would lift tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for 90 days — a move that garnered criticism from some Republican lawmakers who represent ranching communities — Rollins explained the thought process behind that move.
“What we inherited a year and a half ago [was a] 23 percent increase on average of food under Joe Biden. We have now brought that way down. The average is now around two percent, which is the 10-year average,” she told Marlow. “But there are some outliers, and one of those is beef.”
We have the lowest cattle herd in 75 years, people are eating more beef than ever before. Normally, when you have a higher demand […] the price goes up, and then people eat less of it. That is not happening in beef. People love their beef. So the president is really working, and his decision to import to lift the TRQ — the tariff rate quota — off of about 300,000 metric tons of that three million that we already import, he felt very strongly that that could significantly decrease the cost of a pound of ground beef, which is hovering around $6.50 right now.
Noting that “a lot of our lower income, socioeconomically disadvantaged Americans” rely on ground beef as an inexpensive healthy protein, Rollins added that “the president is attuned to that.”
“So we’ll see. Hopefully, it works,” Rollins said. “If it doesn’t, he’s already said he’d go back to rip that [order] up and go back to the way it was before.”
When Marlow asked about a more long-term solution, Rollins pointed out her projects that have worked to undo much of the damage from the Biden administration making an “enemy” out of cattle ranchers.
“They blamed cattle for climate change, right? They wanted nothing to do with our cattle ranchers,” she said, before citing the Biden administration’s restriction on the public land leased by ranchers for grazing their herds. “The Biden-Harris regime basically began to close all of that down.”
Instead of being an agency focused on farming, Rollins argued that the USDA was all about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) under its previous rule.
“I canceled 900 DEI trainings on day one […] We have completely moved in the direction of working to solve those infrastructure problems,” she stated. “We have four packers that harvest 85 percent of the beef in America. Two of those are not even American-owned, and that has really squeezed our ranchers for a really really long time. So there are major structural issues that have resulted in this herd low.”
Despite that herd low, the USDA recorded last month the first time that heifer retention — ranchers keeping more of their female cows — has increased in a decade.
“So I think we are changing the fundamentals in such a way that for the long term, especially as Americans want more beef, the world wants more of American beef, we’re going to be able to meet that demand in a pretty significant way,” Rollins told Marlow.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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