Bullard: Livestock producers should embrace tariffs

R-CALF USA is aggressively pursuing tariffs for cattle, sheep, beef and lamb. And it seems we’re the only national livestock association that is doing so.

You’ll recall we’ve made requests to our U.S. trade representative and to our secretary of commerce seeking tariffs for cattle, sheep, beef and lamb.

For sheep, we seek tariffs under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, and for sheep, lamb, cattle and beef, we are seeking tariffs protection under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

In our initial request for sheep, we asserted the sheer volume of lamb and mutton imports have caused serious injury to our domestic sheep industry, which lost 70% of the U.S. market to imports up through 2023, only to see it lose even more in 2024, when the importer’s share jumped to 73%.

We believe tariffs are essential if we are to achieve the self-sufficiency needed to meet our national security goals. And we’re not there now for either the sheep industry, which has now lost 73% of the domestic market to imports, or the cattle industry, which has now lost about 22% of its domestic market to imports.

But some groups continue to oppose tariffs. Let’s look at why.

The argument against tariffs is that we primarily import low-quality beef — what we call lean-grinding beef — to mix with our higher quality domestic trim, and we then export higher quality beef around the world. Their argument is that tariffs will somehow disrupt what they call a net win for the domestic industry.

But when we look at the actual trade data, we find that over the past five years, the difference in value between our beef exports and our beef imports that would be subject to tariffs is only about 76 cents per pound, with imports being 76 cents per pound cheaper.

That’s certainly not a big quality difference, and that’s because the mix of products we import and export has changed over the years.

If we look at 2024 import data, we find that our No. 1 and No. 2 beef imports were boneless frozen beef and boneless fresh and chilled beef, respectively. These are what are considered the lower quality products, and they make up about 83% of imports.

But, if we look at 2024 export data, we find that our No. 1 and No. 2 beef exports are the same type of products, boneless frozen beef and boneless fresh and chilled beef, respectively. And these make up 67% of our exports. No wonder the difference in value is so small.

But also consider this: In 2024, we also imported 3.4 million pounds of tongues and 134 million pounds of beef offal. I don’t think producers would have expected that we import well over 100 million pounds of product that we’ve all been told we don’t consume much of here in the United States.

Clearly, these cheaper value imports should tilt the value difference more, but when we import and export many of the same type of products, we get what we have — a value difference of only 76 cents per pound.

The second argument against tariffs, particularly for live cattle imports, is that we need imported live cattle to make up the seasonal supply shortages to allow our packing plants and feedlots to operate at optimal levels. The same argument is made for beef imports — we need those imports to make up domestic beef supply shortages.

Well, hold on here. Let’s look at the canary in the coal mine, our domestic sheep industry, to see how this worked out for them.

When domestic lamb consumption began increasing around 2011, there was a supply shortage of lamb in the U.S. and lamb prices paid to sheep producers started to increase substantially, to about $2 per pound.

But instead of allowing these higher domestic lamb prices to incentivize sheep producers to breed more sheep and increase domestic production, the United States opened the floodgates to imports to fill the gap.

We all know what happened. Imports increased, displacing the opportunity for our domestic industry to ramp up production. And over the years, as domestic consumption kept increasing, so too did imports increase and so too did domestic lamb production continue to fall.

And that’s why we have so few sheep producers, so few ewes, so little domestic production and why we now rely more on imports to satisfy America’s appetite for lamb.

Tariffs can prevent this from happening to our cattle industry, but cattle producers will need to get on board in a hurry and start asking our decision-makers to support tariffs. We don’t have much time.

Bill Bullard, formerly a cow/calf rancher in South Dakota, is the CEO of R-CALF USA.