Ranchers to Trump: We got you elected. Now we need your help.

Then, in August, a massive fire engulfed a Tyson Foods beef plant in Holcomb, Kansas. The plant is enormous, processing 6,000 cattle a day, or roughly five percent of all cattle slaughtered in America. It’s temporarily closed, and until it reopens, feedlot operators are going without a major buyer, which is pushing their prices down.

The fact that one fire can negatively impact so many ranchers was cited as an example of the dangers of consolidation at Wednesday’s Senate hearing. During his testimony, Shane Eaton, a Montana-based rancher and feedlot operator, pointed to a recent report from Kansas State University showing that, after the fire, prices for feed cattle fell by around $185 per head. The feeders, the report says, won’t have positive returns on their animals until next year. 

“When the fire happened, we saw two and a half days of futures going straight down,” he said. “I don’t see the futures going up for two and a half days when that plant reopens.”

At the same time, the scarcity caused by the fire has arguably benefitted Tyson. Indeed, as the Kansas State report shows, the margins enjoyed by packers on each head of cattle has grown by nearly four times their annual average, to around $550. For that reason, some ranchers believe the fire could have been deliberate—just another tactic to manipulate the market. In an apparent show of good faith, Sec. Perdue has directed the USDA’s packers and stockyards division to investigate whether any price manipulation, collusion, or unfair practices have occurred as a result of the fire.

Transparency in pricing is one thing. Another issue that the tweeters are hoping to bring attention to—and one that wasn’t on the docket in the committee hearing—is country of origin labeling. Since 2015, beef and pork that’s imported to the United States but processed here can be legally marketed and sold as a “product of the U.S.A.” That processing, by the way, could be as minimal as simply repackaging an already finished product.

The tweeters, who include Fox News firebrand Tomi Lahren, are asking the administration to turn back a repeal of COOL, which occurred in 2015. That repeal, she and others allege, has coincided with falling cattle prices, and rising meatpacking profits. After foreign beef no longer had to bear the label, imports rose, particularly in the grass-fed sector. That’s caused prices of domestic cattle—which, critics argue, are now part of an undifferentiated morass of meat—to fall.

As is sometimes the case in farming, country of origin is the kind of issue that makes for strange political bedfellows.

“It’s not every day I agree with Tomi Lahren,” tweeted J.D. Scholten, a progressive Democratic candidate for Republican Steve King’s House seat in Iowa in 2020, who today joined in on the #FairCattleMarkets campaign. “But when three billion pounds of lower quality meat are imported annually and repackaged as products of the U.S., we need action to protect our cattle ranchers. We need to reinstate COOL!!!”