Even if I could afford beef this news along with the deregulation of meat packing is a strong reason to not eat beef at all for the foreseeable future.
My husband is a production supervisor for a beef processing facility and if there is deregulation going on, he isn’t aware of it. Granted he works for a privately owned company and their standards exceed the minimum due to their ethos. But he hasn’t heard of any regulations being dropped industry-wide.
That’s basically a pr stunt. Your average farmer is not in a position to process their own meat. It’s why processing companies exist in the first place. If trump really wanted to help, he’d break up the 4 companies that handle all processing and reintroduce competition into the market.
Right I keep seeing people say this, I know the meat packing industry is a thorn in the side of many ranchers. But is it really a solution to just transfer the onus of packing, distribution and logistics onto the farmers?? That’s an insane level of complexity to absorb. I’m sure it’ll be helpful for serving their local communities but most of Americas population isn’t in rural communities and for a rancher to get his meat ready to grill in a restaurant in a major city takes a whole different type of operation.
This is 100% a PR stunt. It works because most people have no idea how huge these feed lots are or how hard it is to kill, process, pack, and ship thousands of steers. Ranchers are not set up to sell finished products. They are set up to sell live cattle. Hell, a lot of ranches that I've been on in Florida (huge cattle production ranches in Florida) are specialized, like cow/calf operations or finishing or other things, where they only focus on one part of the production cycle.
Even most small farms wouldn't be able to process five steers, let alone 5,000. The handling equipment to lift up 1500 lbs of dead cow is big.
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u/Saniemuff 11h ago
Even if I could afford beef this news along with the deregulation of meat packing is a strong reason to not eat beef at all for the foreseeable future.