From the Editors: In this essay, Joe Maxwell, Farm Action Fund President, shares the ways in which concentrated commercial power is squeezing freedom and independence from Americans. Americans must ask themselves: will the promise of efficiency and affordability be kept by people we don't know and can't hold accountable if we continue giving them power, or should we place our hope for prosperity in independence and local ownership?
I am a fourth-generation farmer from Missouri. I have raised livestock, owned businesses, served in the state legislature and as lieutenant governor, and spent much of my adult life fighting for farmers, ranchers, and rural communities not just to survive, but to thrive.
Through all those experiences, I have come to believe something rather simple: A nation cannot remain free if its people lose control over the necessities of life.
Food is one of them.
That is why the recent controversy over importing more foreign beef into the United States is about much more than hamburger prices. It exposes a fundamental question facing America: Who should control our food system: the people who raise our food and the communities that depend on them, or a handful of multinational corporations with enough economic power to dictate the terms to both farmers and consumers?
Earlier this year, the Trump administration increased the amount of lower-tariff beef that could enter the United States from Argentina, quadrupling Argentina’s imports. More recently, the administration opened the door over the next three months to another 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings from foreign suppliers.
If we want more American beef tomorrow, America’s ranchers must have a reason to raise more cattle today.
The stated objective is understandable: Americans are paying too much for beef at the grocery store.
They are. But that does not mean cattle producers are being paid too much.
I walk into the grocery store, too. Families are struggling to afford food. We should be doing everything we reasonably can to lower our grocery bills.
But importing hundreds of millions of pounds of additional foreign beef does not address the underlying problem. In fact, it risks making it worse.
America’s cattle herd has fallen to levels we have not seen in generations. Drought, high input costs, years of poor returns, and other pressures have caused ranchers to reduce their herds or leave the business altogether. Now that cattle prices have finally risen enough to encourage ranchers to rebuild the U.S. beef supply, flooding the market with imported beef sends exactly the wrong economic signal.
If we want more American beef tomorrow, America’s ranchers must have a reason to raise more cattle today.
Instead of rebuilding domestic production, we are once again reaching overseas for a short-term solution.
This is where the conversation needs to move beyond beef.
People naturally assume that when beef reaches record prices at the grocery store, cattle ranchers must be getting rich.
That is not how our food system works.
Farmers and ranchers are largely price takers. We buy seed, fertilizer, equipment, fuel, and other inputs at prices established by increasingly concentrated industries. Then we raise a crop or animal and ask another concentrated group of companies what they will pay us for it.
Competition disciplines greed.
Four companies dominate 85% of beef processing in the United States.
On the other end of the chain, grocery retailing has also become extraordinarily concentrated, with four companies controlling 69% of retail grocery sales.
That means the farmer and the consumer stand at opposite ends of a food system increasingly controlled by powerful corporations in the middle.
Importing more beef from mostly unnamed countries will almost guarantee cattle producers will be paid less, with no assurance that consumers will pay less. The winners will be the corporations in the middle: the meatpackers and retail grocers, because they control the market space between those who raise our food and those who buy it.
One basic principle I was taught in economics at the University of Missouri was that capitalism regulates itself through competition.
Competition disciplines greed.
If one business charges too much, another business sees an opportunity and enters the market. If one company pays suppliers too little, a competitor can offer more and gain their business. Competition disperses economic power because no company can dictate the terms forever.
But remove competition, and something changes.
Capitalism becomes extractive.
Dale Ahlquist
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A corporation with overwhelming market power does not have to beat its competitors if meaningful competitors no longer exist. It can use its size to squeeze suppliers, dictate terms to workers, influence government, and demand excessive prices at the grocery store. It can make more money by avoiding competition with the other two or three dominant corporations than by competing against them.
As ownership becomes more distant, accountability often becomes more distant with it.
That isn’t a free market. It is a market captured by power.
Localism is sometimes dismissed as nostalgia: farmers’ markets, Main Street shops, and a romantic longing for an America that no longer exists.
I see something much more important.
Localism is about ownership, accountability, and competition. It is about building an economy that works for the people.
When you buy from a local butcher, farmer, grocer, hardware store, or restaurant, there is a person behind that business. That person lives somewhere. He or she has neighbors, employees, customers, and a reputation.
You know who is responsible.
As ownership becomes more distant, accountability often becomes more distant with it.
A multinational corporation can close a plant and devastate a community because a spreadsheet at corporate headquarters says capital will earn a slightly higher return somewhere else. A dominant meatpacker can decide where cattle will be slaughtered. A massive retailer can decide which products receive shelf space and what suppliers must do to get it.
Eventually, communities stop making economic decisions for themselves.
They become dependent on decisions made somewhere else.
That is the opposite of independence.
And this is not simply a rural problem.
When the local grocery store disappears, consumers lose a choice. When the independent meat processor closes, the rancher loses a market. When the local manufacturer shuts down, workers lose bargaining power. When independent businesses disappear, communities lose both wealth and leadership.
True economic resilience requires redundancy.
Every closure concentrates a little more power somewhere else.
For decades, leaders in both political parties accepted the proposition that bigger was better.
They argued that consolidation created efficiency and that efficiency would reward the consumer.
Efficiency meant lower prices.
And lower prices supposedly meant prosperity: more money in people’s pockets.
But efficiency and dependency are not the same thing.
A food system controlled by a few enormous companies may look efficient on a corporate balance sheet. It may also be extremely fragile for a nation.
We learned this during COVID when supply chains broke. We see it when a single meatpacking plant closes, and cattle markets across an entire region are disrupted. We see it when farmers have only one or two buyers for what they produce.
True economic resilience requires redundancy.
It requires independent businesses, regional processors, local and regional markets, and, above all, competition to restrain greed.
That does not mean every tomato, automobile, or television must be produced within fifty miles of our homes. Trade has always been part of prosperous societies.
The question is not whether America should trade.
The question is whether trade complements domestic productive capacity or replaces it.
There is nothing wrong with buying something from another country that we cannot reasonably produce ourselves. But there is something profoundly wrong with allowing our own productive capacity to disappear and then congratulating ourselves because a multinational corporation can source large volumes elsewhere to meet the demands of dominant processors and retailers.
It is wrong that Taylor Farms, which supplies 60% of all salad mix sold in the United States, imports lettuce from Mexico during the peak U.S. lettuce season. It is equally troubling that during our tomato off-season, the United States imports tomatoes from Canada, which should obviously be Canada’s off-season. These examples show how disconnected our food supply can become from the farmers and communities that can produce that food here at home.
A country that cannot produce the essential goods—the necessities—its own people need eventually becomes dependent on the countries that do produce them and the monopolies that control their delivery.
We launched the Rural Independence Initiative to restore competition.
It begins in rural America, but it is not just for rural America.
Our purpose is to bring people together across political lines around a basic proposition: Americans deserve the freedom that comes from economic independence.
That requires competitive markets.
It requires enforcing our antitrust laws and modernizing them where they have failed. It requires protecting independent producers from abusive market practices. It requires rebuilding local and regional food processing and opening markets to entrepreneurs. It requires transparency so consumers can know where their food comes from. And it requires public policy that asks more than whether a merger or corporate practice produces some theoretical short-term efficiency.
The answer to today’s beef crisis, therefore, is not simply Argentine beef or American beef. The real question is what kind of economy we want.
We should also ask: Does it leave Americans more free?
Does the farmer have another buyer?
Does the worker have another employer?
Does the entrepreneur have a realistic opportunity to enter the market?
Does the consumer have another choice?
Does the community retain ownership and wealth?
Those questions should matter in a free-market capitalist society.
America’s promise has never been that prosperity belongs to a fortunate few.
It is the promise that every person who works hard, takes responsibility, and serves their community should have a fair opportunity to build a good life—to share in the prosperity their work helps build.
The answer to today’s beef crisis, therefore, is not simply Argentine beef or American beef.
The real question is what kind of economy we want.
Do we want one where farmers, workers, independent businesses, and communities have enough economic power to determine their own futures?
Or one where an increasingly small number of corporations determine what farmers are paid, what workers earn, what consumers pay, and where our food comes from?
For me, that is not a question of left versus right.
It is a question of dependence versus independence; monopoly versus competition; and centralized power versus dispersed ownership.
And ultimately, it is a question of freedom.
If we want to remain a free people, we should demand an economy in which ownership is broad, markets are competitive, communities are strong, and the people who do the work have a fair opportunity to prosper.
That work can begin with something as simple as knowing the farmer who raised your food, buying from the independent business down the road, or asking your grocery store to stock beef that was born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in America.
But it cannot end there.
We must demand that our elected officials enact and enforce the laws necessary to restore competitive markets and rebuild the institutions that make local ownership and economic independence possible.
Because keeping it local isn’t merely about where we spend our dollars.
It is about keeping power close enough to the people that they can still control their own destiny and share in the prosperity they help build.
