Cheap Was a Decision. So is This.

By Cory Carman

There’s a lot of discussion about beef right now, thanks largely to the recent decision to remove tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from unspecified countries. Consumers are scratching their heads, cattle producers are furious, and the whole thing has opened the door to a bigger conversation. Ranchers, comedians and politicians are weighing in, and there’s no shortage of social media posts and reels questioning where this meat is coming from and whether it's even beef.

A lot of the conversation has centered on safety. People are asking what standards were followed, where the animals were raised and what ended up in the meat. I’m confident horse meat isn’t crossing the border, and I don’t believe eating an imported burger will cause anyone to fail a drug test. But I’m glad we’re finally paying attention and asking questions.

Part of the reason these rumors took hold is that we have very little visibility into the beef supply chain. Four companies control roughly 85% of the meat processing market in the US, operating at a sale and speed that’s difficult to grasp. And unlike many other foods, beef doesn't have mandatory country-of-origin labeling. My T-shirt, by comparison, has to tell me where it was made. The same goes for salmon, lamb and tomatoes. Beef was carved out of those regulations in 2016.

The lack of transparency does nothing to build consumer confidence. But it’s  important to remember that this isn't a new problem. It's the result of how we built the system was built. 

Cheap beef was a choice we made collectively. We decided that feeding people affordably and efficiently was a priority and the industry responded. The resulting system is an impressive logistical achievement. Like most commodity systems, it delivers consistency, enormous volume, and low prices. 

The beef market is global, and the United States is both the world's largest beef importer and exporter. In a system built this way, price is the attribute that travels reliably through the supply chain. Everything else — how the animal was raised, what it ate, how it was managed, who raised it — is hard to see.  And anything that costs without adding value to the commodity gets pushed aside.

We're beginning to understand the cost of cheap food. It solved one problem, but created others: too many empty calories, not enough nutrition. and a food system that has traded resilience for efficiency. That trade-off may have made sense at one point. In the face of climate change, it makes much less sense to me. The good news is that we get to make different choices now.

I grew up on a ranch and have been around cattle my whole life, but it wasn’t until my twenties that I really began to understand the dynamics of the beef industry. Since coming back to the ranch and building a business around selling beef, I’ve kept learning and looking for ways  to work outside the system. 

What matters most to me is how we treat the land, how we treat our animals, and the quality of the food we put in our bodies. Raising livestock touches all three. Doing it well matters to me personally, but it also matters to the health of the ranch and the strength of our community. 

Building a business that lives up to those values has been a two-decade exercise in navigating hurdles and finding ways around barriers. Most years, we’ve just barely made it through because of great partners– retailers, restaurants and chefs who believed in what we’re doing. Along the way, we’ve worked hard to become more efficient and to close the very narrow gap between what it costs to produce good food and what people are willing to pay for it, while making sure the processor, distributor and retailer can make a living, too

One experiment that has worked for us from the beginning is our cow share program. Individuals purchase a share of a cow born, raised and harvested on the ranch, and  we arrange for processing and delivery to Portland. The customer saves 25% or more compared with buying the same cuts at retail. 

I’ve been delivering cowshares Portland and Seattle for 20 years. I know  the animal I tagged when it was born, the pastures it rotated through for two  years. and the steer I stood with when it was harvested. I pick up the cut beef from a  plant whose employees I know and where I can walk in any day. And then I watch family and neighbors who bought an entire cow together meet in a parking lot to divide it up, negotiating over cuts, bartering, joking and promising to invite each other over the last tenderloin or the first burgers. 

It’s an old-fashioned way of buying and eating meat: seasonally, one cow at a time, directly from a farm where it was born and raised. It can sound  quaint and, to most people,inaccessible. That’s a fair critique. But only if we accept that participating  in a huge, consolidated, multinational meat trade is somehow more modern or normal. 

There’s the question of  convenience, too. And even that depends on how you look at it. From my experience, having a freezer full of meat is far more convenient than going to the store and figuring out what to buy every  week.

I don’t want to minimize the very real barriers. Most people don’t have a chest freezer or the ability to buy a side of beef all at once. ButI do want to illuminate the  alternatives that already exist — ways of buying food that offer a level of transparency the current system can’t. They don’t have to be relics of the past. They can be part of the future. What becomes normal depends, in part,  on what we decide to support. 

I’ve always thought about modern agriculture as a beautiful blend of ancient traditions and modern technology. The art is figuring out where and how to apply each. That can mean using virtual electric fencing and cow collars to mimic grazing patterns that happened millennia ago, the same patterns under which grasslands once thrived. It can mean testing the nutrient density of our beef to understand which plant compounds make their way from the pasture into the meat.. It can mean choosing to support a family-run processing plant, buying directly from a rancher, and picking up cardboard boxes of meat in a parking lot, even if you use AI to figure out what to do with a sirloin tip roast.

I am truly grateful to have grown up and lived in an agricultural community. I know so many good people in communities like mine, working incredibly hard to  care for the land and their animals. They can read a pasture, sense when an animal is uncomfortable, hold things together through drought, and do whatever it takes to stay on the land. They aren’t hiding, but they are largely invisible in a system that was built for us not to see them. 

The system that does see them and honors their work is small and largely ad-hoc. Some people have been building it their entire lives. What makes that system grow and evolve into something that works for more people is actually pretty simple: demand. 

Every box of beef a rancher sells sends a signal back through the community. It tells the local processor that there’s enough business to invest in capacity. It tells the neighboring rancher that she might be able to  sell a few head directly to families in her community. It tells a young person who wants to raise animals that there might be an honest future in doing that work. As producers, we are constantly looking for those signals. We need to know that there is  a stable and profitable future before we take on more risk, invest in infrastructure or grow our herds.When the future is uncertain, we do the opposite. We minimize our exposure. We don’t grow.

I know that buying beef this way isn't realistic for every household right now. It takes freezer space, cash up front and willingness to plan ahead. But it is realistic for some, and those households can help pave the way for everyone else. Early demand is what makes the infrastructure possible. The people buying shares of beef today aren’t just buying beef. They're helping to create the demand that can revitalize regional beef production — more processing capacity, more ranchers able to sell directly, more opportunities for the next generation. . Strengthening that relationship between consumers and producers is one way we can replace some of the uncertainty in our food system with something more tangible: knowing who raised your food, how they raised it and who you’re supporting when you buy it. 

The more we say yes to that, the more room there is for innovation. And the more we can begin to build and reclaim a food system that works differently.

 Are you ready to get started?