What The Hell Is Going On With Beef? | Brooke Rollins #505 | The Way I Heard It

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins at the Reagan Library for a conversation about farmers, food, freedom, and the curious path that took a former FFA kid from a tiny town in Texas all the way to the President's Cabinet. It was a good conversation, and I was looking forward to sharing it.

Then, the price of ground beef became headline news: https://bit.ly/4iUux1n. The President announced a temporary pause on tariffs for hundreds of thousands of tons of imported beef, and a lot of American ranchers weren't thrilled. Several of them called me. Some I've known since my Dirty Jobs days. Others I've met more recently. All had questions, and so did I.

Which is why, before posting our original conversation, I called Brooke back and asked her to explain what's happening in the wide world of ground beef. Why is the American cattle herd at a 75-year low? Why are we importing more beef when American ranchers are struggling? What's the difference between helping consumers in the short term and protecting producers in the long term? And when you buy a package of beef at the grocery store, shouldn't you know where the hell it came from?

Those questions led us into a much bigger conversation about the increasingly complicated business of feeding 340 million people in a country where most of us have grown accustomed to full shelves, affordable food, and very little thought about how any of it gets there.

A lot happened in between these two conversations. And if you share my addiction to chewing and swallowing things, this one's probably worth your time.

#podcast #agriculture #farming

𝐀 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨:
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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐧 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧:
00:00 The oath that started it all
03:21 Why welding matters more than you think
05:42 How Brooke ended up in the Cabinet
11:37 Why the FFA changed its name
14:40 Why Brazil matters to American ranchers
16:43 Can we save the family farm?
22:54 RFK Jr. partnership
31:43 What’s really happening to ground beef?
40:10 Why food security is national security
44:51 What would you tell an American rancher?
51:16 Who really controls the meat supply?
54:24 What does “Product of USA” actually mean?