Every time the beef industry finds itself in another conversation about cattle prices, meatpackers and the future of the American rancher, one solution seems to come up again and again: Why don’t consumers just buy their beef directly from ranchers?
On the surface, it makes sense and a win for both sides. Consumers get what they want straight from the producer, giving them confidence in what they are buying. On the producer side, bypassing middle man from the feedlots to the meatpackers, ranchers could keep more of the money and have more control over where their cattle go.
Direct-to-consumer beef is a great option, and for some producers it is a successful business model. But as someone who lives in the middle of the beef industry, I know firsthand it isn’t the simple solution it is sometimes made out to be.
Our operation, like thousands of others across the country, is a cow-calf operation. We raise calves, manage genetics, care for our rangeland and work to produce healthy cattle before weaning them and starting the cycle over again. That’s where our experience, infrastructure, labor and capital are invested.
What we aren’t set up to do is retain ownership of those calves for another year or more, background them, manage finishing rations, absorb the additional feed and weather risk, arrange slaughter dates, ensure USDA-inspected processing, handle cold storage and distribute beef to consumers.
Instead we specialize in our part of the chain and send our beef on. That’s why feedlots exist. That’s why processors exist. The different parts of the beef industry were developed around different areas of expertise, and there is efficiency in that specialization.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Direct-to-consumer beef absolutely has a place. It can work well for smaller or diversified operations, producers who want to vertically integrate, and niche markets such as freezer beef or grass-fed programs. For the right operation, it can be a profitable and meaningful way to connect directly with consumers.
But it isn’t a realistic alternative for the majority of cow-calf producers, and it isn’t capable of replacing the broader beef supply chain. The average American family isn’t buying a whole beef at a time. Grocery stores and restaurants need a consistent supply of individual cuts of beef, and moving that much beef from ranches to consumers requires a much larger system. Asking every cow-calf producer to become a feedlot, processor, cold-storage facility and distributor doesn’t solve the problem. It simply moves an enormous and unnecessary amount of financial and logistical risk onto the rancher.
That doesn’t mean the current system doesn’t have problems.
The beef industry operates under a packing sector dominated by a few large companies, and decisions made by those companies have a direct effect on cattle producers. Plant closures, changes in slaughter schedules and reduced competition all have the potential to change the market a rancher is selling into.
That’s where I think the conversation needs to be.
Rather than suggesting that every rancher find a way to sell directly to consumers, we should be looking at how to create more competition within the existing system—through regional processing capacity, better price transparency, meaningful price discovery and antitrust enforcement that actually protects competition.
I don’t want to discount direct-to-consumer beef. I like knowing where my food comes from, and I understand why consumers want that connection with the people raising it. But we also have to recognize that the beef industry is made up of a lot of different operations, each filling a different role.
Direct-to-consumer beef is a lane. It just isn’t the highway.
If we want a strong American beef industry for the future, we need solutions that work not just for the rancher selling a few beef directly to families, but for the thousands of cattle producers whose job is to raise the cattle that eventually become the beef on all of our tables.
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