On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said that President Donald Trump’s move to import beef just “really hurt the cattle market.” And it would help if the President would “look seriously at opening up some more public lands for foraging.”
Rounds said, [relevant remarks begin around 4:40] “Look, first of all, the President, we believe, got some really bad advice at this time to suggest that 300 metric tons of beef was anything but something that was going to really hurt the cattle market. And our guys really felt it. It’s kind of like one of those things where they really felt like he pulled the rug out right from underneath them, and he’s a relative, they love this guy and they just felt like he really let them down with this.”
He continued, “At the same time, what he is saying right now with regard to the big four, they control over 80% of the processing of beef in the United States today, clearly, way more than what they should have on it, and they do have an impact. … He could look seriously at opening up some more public lands for foraging. Under the previous administration, they had locked up a lot of that stuff. We made some inroads in terms of getting some of it open. We need more grass so that these young producers out there know that they’ve got a place for a cow to go and to get…feed.”
Rounds added, “The markets went down on beef up here just at a time when a lot of them were trying to sell their cows and their calves.” And the “most important” move is to get more cows, which means you need more grass.
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