By Kevin Tournes, Midwest cattle rancher
And Yoichi Shimatsu
3-17-26

About the Author: Kevin Tournes and his family raise top-quality beef cattle grazing on orchard grass along the western bank of the Ohio River, across from the shore of West Virginia - at an environmentally safe distance south of industrial Youngstown and a long ways east of Cincinnati. Tall grass waving in the gentle breeze by the swirling waterway may seem to any visitor an idyllic portrait of traditional American rural life - that is, if it were not for the immense pressures on the Tournes clan and their neighbors confronting Dupont's dire legacy of chemical contamination of the local aquifer and the more recent threat of an attempted land grab by the aggressive planners of a data center (a project effectively opposed and blocked by Kevin’s family and fellow farm folk throughout the southeast Ohio region).

A less visible threat to independent cattle ranchers, however, arises from drastic changes in this nation’s cattle-rearing sector due to monopolistic consolidation of the beef industry by huge corporate entities control of the massive livestock holdings and meat-packing plants. The Big Four conglomerates are: Cargill, Tyson and two suppliers unfamiliar to most American consumers: JBS and Marfrig aka National Beef - both headquartered in Brazil and among the world’s largest beef packers. All are ruthless toward the diminishing numbers of smaller competitors and traditional ranchers with pricing wars and property takeovers.

A quick look at supermarket prices of steak and even ground beef lately will show the consumer that the soaring price of a main course for dinner has not decreased due to corporate claims of “efficiency of scale”. To the contrary, even humble meatballs are getting unaffordable for the average American family. Here, in this series of essays - “Where’s the Beef?” - the expanding domination of this nation’s meat supply through corporate finance is examined with a critical edge - in defense of the family dinner table and on behalf of affordability for all Americans - and to defend our traditional heritage of family-based cattle ranching.

The first point to recall is how the family dinner table is sacrosanct in American society, when relatives and close friends even the humblest of kinfolk would gather on a weekend or national holiday for a prayer before their home-cooked feast is served - often highlighted by a big turkey or roast beef, and on more informal occasions a stack of grilled sausages or burgers on the grill. Today, however, the cost of meat is becoming prohibitive for average families other than for this society’s leisurely upper crust. It used to be that grandparents would begin the preparations for a family feast by strolling over to the neighborhood butcher’s shop to select among choice cuts on display marbled with fat for a roast or ribs to be roasted on the grill or the old oven.

In the not-too distant past there was never any secrecy about where the beef cattle were raised - usually a day’s truck drive from your home - and no questions about the beef cattle’s diet of abundant grass and hay. And best of all, the main course tasted great and gave one a feeling of new strength in the limbs essential for another week of hard work. Those good days are over and done with - as dubious meat arrives in a cardboard box or under plastic wrap at your “local” supermarket chain from some unnamed foreign source at untold distance from home - nearly always from an unsustainable and unhealthy feed lot or even from deforested jungles. And the beef’s not the same when it’s been frozen for months, hauled over by cargo ship and defrosted for sale to sit for weeks and even months on display in a chiller - and sold at a staggering price - to cover the supply chain costs of fuel, feed, low-end labor, bribes to the local politicians, bank fees and huge profits for obscure elites. Plus there are no food safety labels or any such guarantees. The consumer bears all the risks and the hidden costs. By contrast meat from your local ranch - well, you know where it’s located and probably too the name of the family who raised the cattle.  Lesson: You should have eaten a lot more filet mignon ala Americana when it was comparatively cheap by today’s pricing standards!

You might be wondering: What? Brazil?  Nowadays one of the world’s biggest beef producers? Isn’t that South American paradise the land of bikini beach ball and samba hip gyrations, the tango - as in the movie “Evita” (with Madonna in the role of a dictator’s wife Evita Peron) - and the vast Amazon rain forest? Those humble-in-the-jungle images are by now past history after vast swaths of the tropical rain forest have been chopped down for ever-wider grazing space for cattle herds - most of them destined for foreign consumption - burgers across the U.S., beef noodle soup in China, char-grilled barbecue in South Korea, and steakhouses worldwide. All of the Big Four beef-suppliers are rapacious corporate monopolies including the Brazilian giants, who in addition are known to bribe and corrupt their government officials to manipulate the World Trade Organization (WTO) and very likely ag officials here in the USA. One of the recent presidents of Brazil was forced out of office in the past decade when caught banking his massive payoffs from Big Beef executives in Rio.

Since Christmas 2015 consumers in every nation have zero knowledge of country of origin under the iron rules of the UN-related World Trade Organization (WTO), which has eliminated the practice of printing nation of origin on food products at supermarkets. Where’s the beef coming from? Dunno - we’re in the dark. Where’s it going? To your backyard grill or a frying pan on the stove. What if that meat is tainted by pathogens? Not a thing you about other than pay the hospital bill for your sick kids. Nobody cares - other than your medical doctor. The WTO ruling - that aimed to level the playing field - put an end to the health-safety norm of “traceability” for food shipments. If you kid has to skip schooldays due to a stomach ache or a grandparent dies of food poisoning there is no system by which to trace back to identify the original source of contamination.

Ruthless irresponsible corporate domination of the beef market is a direct threat not only to public health but also to our local-based American ranchers, when many small ranches and even the biggest U.S. feed lots have been forced to shut down. The massive agribusiness outfits such as the Brawley feedlot, south of California’s Salton Sea has simply vanished - replaced by cardboard boxes of frozen meat from distant sources in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

Think of it: When was the last time you got a glimpse of a cattle round-up at a huge ranch by a highway? Those all-American scenes - as celebrated in that old TV series “Rawhide”, which kick-started Clint Eastwood’s acting career - are becoming ancient history, along with sending livestock to the Chicago and New York from the railhead in Kansas City. Increasingly, frozen carcasses arrives in aboard refrigerated container ships without a label of country of origin and transported from the port of call by unmarked trucks (often driven by foreigners) heading to packinghouses where production lines are staffed by meat packers from foreign lands who don’t speak English and dare not report bacteria-tainted product. The inspectors are there to keep watch over the captive workers and not to remove disease-tainted carcasses. The meat is then plastic-wrapped for sale at your local supermarket. Thus, there is no way to determine what exactly put your children or grandparents in the hospital with a case of food poisoning

“Raised in the USA” is becoming obsolete in more ways than one, much like the disappearance of Made in America labels at mega-stores, including Walmart - which has basically become a Made in China clone. Who cares where the beef comes from so long at that burger tastes good with a pile of fixings? So try one sprinkled only with salt - it tastes like grilled cardboard. There’s a notable difference from the juicy burger you used to gobble down as a kid at a local drive-in made of fresh beef from a ranch down the road.

There are untold risks to foreign-sourced meat, that the USDA isn’t warning consumers about. Cattle raised in vast numbers without human supervision have a tendency to pick up strange diseases in tropical climates, for instance COVID, of which there are more than 50 variants in Brazil’s Amazon basin (an issue to be examined in detail in Part 2 of this ongoing report on the Beef Wars.) You are what you eat - and that could mean an early painful death. The Brazilian health department repeatedly found bacterial contamination in beef at packinghouses - but standard norms of inspection were halted under a massive cover-up authorized by the country’s presidential office (a crime related to the deaths of untold consumers that resulted in a federal investigation and the removal of El Presidente.) While this article series does not aim to be alarmist, Marfrig-Leucadia combine supplies raw meat to the U.S. military from its packing houses in Dodge City and Liberal Kansas. Could that pose a threat to national security when the current U.S. President has criticized foreign control over this nation’s food supply? The bets are on. Food Safety or Gut Busters?

By contrast cattle raised on American family farms tend to be in excellent physical condition, cared for under constant watch of owner-ranchers for any hint of infection and infirmities, fed on native grass and insect-free clean hay and not pumped with huge doses of antibiotics or pharmaco-chemicals. Family owned cattle are also provided with pristine filtered water free of parasites and toxins. It takes a lot of close-up care, proper supervision and cleanliness to raise beef cattle fit for human consumption or even for dog food. Cattle raisers in southern Ohio, for instance, where the winter snowfall naturally suppresses bacteria, has been an ideal environment for top-of-the-line beef cattle - and the Midwest location is also close enough to the urban markets to ensure the absence of bacterial contamination.

Despite all their efforts at consumer safety and satisfaction, this nation’s cattle raisers are on the defensive - increasingly shut out of a vast swath of shopping centers and food markets dominated by mega-monopolies, whose practices are determined overwhelmingly by the profit margin and not quality or product safety. Enjoy filet mignon rare? Not advisable nowadays - better to grill that hunk down to a char - or risk a gut ache. That’s not fine dining but more like high-risk folly at a high cost in more ways than one.

What’s All the Fuss About?

Let’s start by taking it from top - to show it’s not only rancher families and farmers who are alarmed by the financial consolidation of American agriculture, resulting in expanding control over this nation’s cattle herds by mega-corporations who believe themselves to be above “the Law of the Land”. In a little publicized speech that got hardly any press coverage, Donald Trump laid out the facts of the ongoing farm-and-ranch crisis in the heart of this nation: which was posted on his social network and reported by Farm Journal and Bloomberg on November 17, 2025.

“President Donald Trump called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the so-called Big Four meatpacking conglomerates ‘that have a hammerlock on beef processing, distribution and pricing in the U.S.’ His allegations are serious: price fixing, collusion and market manipulation by what he calls ‘foreign-owned meatpacking cartels.’ Together the Big Four control 85 percent of the U.S. beef market, which the White House says amounts to monopoly power, allowing the companies to slash payments to farmers, reduce herd sizes, drive up consumer prices and jeopardize the nation’s food supply. ‘Action must be taken immediately to protect consumers, combat illegal monopolies and ensure these corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American people.’”

The news sources went on to explain: “The Big Four themselves have chosen not to comment on the DOJ investigation or the president’s allegations. However the Meat Institute, a trade group representing meat and poultry processors, said beef packers have been losing money because of tight cattle supplies and strong demand. Recent Trump administration actions have concerned many U.S. farmers - namely a trade showdown with China that prompted a halt to buying American soybeans - and Trump threatening to import more beef from Argentina. The President may have won back a measure of farmer support by attacking four of the best-known names in agribusiness: Minnesota-based Cargill, one of the largest privately held companies in the country; Tyson Foods, a major meat and poultry producer out of Arkansas; JBS (Brazil’s world-leadering meatpacker with U.S. operations headquartered in Colorado); National Beef Packing/Marfrig-BFR (Brazil’s second largest beef company with U.S. headquarters in Missouri.”

Thank you, Mr. President, for that boost for our rancher families and rural America! (Recent financial news reports have shown the Brazilian corporate meatpackers to be earning record income from global exports, earnings which have been somewhat restrained by Brazilian court-of-law penalties for domestic fraud and bribery of government officials. When Brazilian regulators have slammed heavy penalties on JBS and Marfrig for corruption of government officials, money-laundering and sub-standard disease-tainted meat - why are these criminal enterprises being given an open-door opportunity to dominate supermarkets and restaurant chains across the USA? Answer: The globalist folly of open-door foreign imports without question and just a few weak rules, in other words wide-open profiteering has replaced American patriotism and respect for this nation’s working people and farmers. Where’s the Beef - from? That is The Question we all must ask.

Squeezing Americans by the Cohones

It seems incredible that the world’s once dominant agrarian nation - the USA - a land of abundance and a veritable cornucopia is being sidelined and exploited by aggressive foreign competitors taking over vast swaths of this nation’s trade in agricultural products, not only tropical fruits and fresh vegetables (notice how substandard those products are as compared with “Grown in the USA”?  More threateningly foreign cut-throats are honing in on basic home-grown commodities including grain and beef cattle. By 2023, overseas growers achieved the seemingly impossible goal of cutting the grown-in-America market share of ag production in half. Foreign producers now control $21 billion of a total wholesale food market of $42 billion. However foreigners are not mainly to blame when the sell-out our national heritage of farming and ranching is actually the business of Wall Street financiers, the big banks, mega-investors and shipping firms whose CEOs and boards of directors have 100 percent loyalty to profiteering at the expense of the American people. The WTO is basically a global cartel of crooks.

Profit versus Consumer Protection

The rapid expansion of Brazil’s No.2 beef producer and second-largest meatpacker in the USA owes more to market maneuvering, along with M&As, than to the basics of livestock rearing. As an example, a multi million dollar tie-up/takeover of Wall Street investor-owned Leucadia beef packing - a holding tank for multiple takeovers of packing houses - suddenly catapulted the Marfrig-BR-National Beef Packing combine into a second-place position in global beef holdings and sales. The sourcing and quality of beef-stock is reduced to a mere numbers game with no connection to consumer satisfaction, product safety or human health. Nowadays those concerns are mere words that get in the way of big-time shareholdings - often aimed at a massive Wall Street listing alongside McDonalds and big oil companies. So do the financial positions of the amassed stockyards and slaughterhouses combined on paper represent an accurate tally or just a mere estimate of projected future earnings? Who knows, who cares when the current strategic goal is a New York Stock Exchange listing for Marfrig - with a little help from the mysterious Leucadia investment firm with a Jewish CEO.

Brazil’s top producers guarantee their meat is Halal - bled upside through a knife cut in their neck veins in an ancient Yiddish ritual in ways similar to circumcision of boys. Of course, Jews with money who control the finances of weaker nations is something of a norm across Latin America from Uruguay to Cuba - since the Spanish Inquisition drove many - although certainly not all - to Spain’s New World colonies across South America. Due to this historic factor, it’s not religious prejudice but a simple fact of social bonding that explains the cozy connections between the Brazilian elite - including owners of beef ranches and mega-packing houses - with Wall Street finance. So the question arises, who benefits from the consolidation of finance and meat imports? Answer: 85 percent of the importation to the USA is accrued by foreign corporations. American truckers and shippers only 15 percent of transport earnings. It’s an insider game that the majority of American citizens are losing.

Yeah, so where’s the beef? Answer: On corporate annual earnings reports. “Money talks” - so how much can the consumer or the environmentalist trust corporate slogans such as “Sustainability” and “grass fed”? Due to the globalist World Trade Organization (WTO) decision on Christmas Day 2015 most imported food products do not require labeling to identify their source of origin - whereas ethically responsibly American growers are hit by a slew of Ag department regulations.. Meanwhile under UN/WTO rules foreign producers merely have to submit safety claims from their own nations’ ag authorities (most of those open to blatant bribery and other types of corruption). Under pressure from the WTO, the USDA did away with once mandatory country-of-origin labeling - Merry Christmas, crooks and cheaters around the world!

An Invasion of Lethal Cattle from Mexico

The dangers of cross-border international food trafficking was highlighted just this past autumn - but only briefly reported in  local news reports limited to Texas and New Mexico, border-states where a belated temporary halt to cross-border live cattle imports from Mexico was triggered by an infestation of a disease-carrier fly that attacks the blood stream and internal organs of every type of mammal including humans. No in-depth report by ag officials - state or federal - was issued to the public on either side of the border about previous shipments of thousands of infected cattle that host the parasitic fly. Their defensive attitude is: “Oh, we should not alarm the public” even if the foreign bug can kill your children. (Note: the since contained measles outbreak transpired along the same Southwest region, with zero mention by medical authorities of its place of origin south of the border or Ukraine, the two likely sources of that otherwise contained disease.) But these big bloopers matter not to the Wall Street Journal.

So now, it’s High Noon for the beef industry - patriotic ranchers versus aggressive foreign importers - with supermarkets as corrupt saloon bar-keeps. The epicenter of the Global Beef Wars is the USA, the home of the supermarket, burger stand, barbecue pit. and gas-or-electric range in your backyard. Beef is at the center of the American way of life, and most folks know nothing about where it comes from, how it was raised and who gains a profit from the skyrocketing price of meat. That lack of attention opens the door to aggressive foreign penetration.

Brazil vs. USA

The fierce struggle to control the world beef market - which involves the closure or takeover of hundreds of meat packing companies, large and small across the USA is - to repeat - being fought by those with the most to gain, primarily the Big Four Tyson and Cargill corporations of the USA, whose dominant market positions are are being challenged by Brazil’s two biggest slaughterhouses JBS and MBRF Global Foods (created in a merger between S.A. and Marfraig, which took over Brazil’s National Beef Packing, NBP). Now for closer detail - Marfrig’s 40,000 employees across Brazil along with neighboring Argentina and Uruguay operate a network of slaughterhouses that butcher 31,200 head of cattle every day. Given a 6-day work week minus Brazil’s long holidays such as Mardi Gras and Christmas - a rough estimate arrives at an output rate of more than 9 million head of cattle a year. The Brazilian global expansion program had resulted in control of slaughterhouses in the USA along with the economically affluent Asia region - Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia. In Brazilian-controlled packinghouses in the USA - the packinghouse takeovers have often resulted in replacement of American meatpackers with Latino butchers and even truckers, in many cases in violation of U.S. immigration law. Rival JBS is a shipper to at least 40 nations, but data on volumn and local packing operations is as yet unavailable due to corporative secretiveness in collusion with crooked politicians in Brazil.

This struggle for financial dominance over the global meat supply is being waged - by proxy takeovers or direct investment - in the food markets more than 50 nations worldwide. The fierce competition is being fought through corporate takeovers of dozens of meat-packers, for instance by Tyson which on the pretext of “efficiency” shutdown Iowa Beef Producers (IBF), once the largest operations in the USA - its meat packers now out of work, steel doors locked and railheads rusting in silence - proving that butchery can be a bloody business in more ways than one.

The corporate pretext for financial warfare has all the qualities of a state-sponsored disinfo campaign in totalitarian states - blame for closures being due to ‘labor inefficiency”, beef supply shortages caused by “the rising cost of hay” at regional ranches and feedlots, higher prices blamed on “a lack of diversity among meat products” and supermarket management neglect of “innovation’ - all these excuses being bogus fingerpointing when the real driving force for consolidation is massive bank-lending aimed at total corporate domination of your shopping dollar. Down to hot dogs instead of grilled steak? It’s part of the war to dominate grocery store shelves and cash-registers. And the social price is to watch shoppers shudder at the rising cost of a main course and walking away with a plastic packet of not-cheap high-fat ground round. The alternative to ever-higher grocery prices is starvation for the captive market in small towns and big cities alike. The squeeze is on, meaning Americans need rally in support of our nation’s farms and ranchers - and independent packinghouses and food outlets. Corporate monopoly has been a disaster for this nation.

A hard cold fact has needs to be remembered is that Brazil-rooted Marfrig has a 52 percent majority controlling ownership of National Meat Packing (NMP) with earnings of $105 billion in 2024 in American sales, and employs 8,000 meat packers aka butchers. And the shopper will never again see that corporate label on a pack of meat. That’s just one example of how the open-door entry of foreign packers into the U.S. meat market has had a massively destructive effect on the Raised-in-USA livestock tradition - which has ensured strenuous health and safety standards (as compared with the flimsy health certification of beef cattle originating from overseas, where inspectors are notoriously corrupt and  pridefully “patriotic” - meaning hating the “Yanqui” - without the least hesitation to ship off sick cattle and questionably processed meat into the U.S. market. “Competitive pricing” is the key word for substandard foodstuffs passed on as prime product in your local supermarket - never mind exotic odors and outright stench. Add lots of mustard and ketchup before gobbling down the mess before being rolled into an emergency room at your local hospital. Don’t blame our surviving cowboys who’re still droving cattle herds - here in home on the range. Happy Trails, friends!

Part 2 of this “Where’s the Beef?” series will focus on the rise of China’s beef industry over the past 25 years from negligible sales in the tribal outlands to nowadays mammoth proportions - as witnessed by an environmental agriculture team led by Yoichi Shimatsu. So watch for: “Did COVID arise from Brazilian Beef and not transmitted by a Chinese Bat? Beef Wars Part 2: China Rising.”