![["welcome to the jungle" news] Trump suggests cattle ranchers could bypass USDA-inspected meat plants [full text inside]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b15404cd-d931-4de1-9ec5-7477caf7906b.png){kind=link}
President Donald Trump said he is working to allow farmers and ranchers to process their own meat instead of having to use USDA-inspected facilities, a policy that appears to have originated during a conversation Wednesday with conservative radio host Glenn Beck. Posting on his Truth Social website about the plan, Trump called large meat-processing companies “a nasty Monopoly,” saying they “make life miserable for our wonderful Farmers and Ranchers.”
There are thousands of meat-processing businesses in the country, though several large companies are responsible for the majority of meat processing in the United States — a fact Beck raised during a live interview with Trump. The longtime radio host, who owns a ranch, referred to the “meat-processing cartel” and asked Trump to work to cut regulations that require farmers and ranchers selling their meat to use facilities regulated and inspected by the U.S. Agriculture Department for slaughtering and meat processing.
“Help us. Help us,” Beck said, urging Trump to “break the back of those processing plants.”
“This is a very big thing. … You just gave me a very good idea,” Trump responded.
Trump has found himself caught between consumers annoyed at the high cost of meat and ranchers frustrated at his decision to temporarily waive tariffs on imported beef — a still unclear plan he recently announced as prices soar amid cattle shortages.
The president wrote that he is “authorizing legal documents to be drawn in order to allow Farmers and Ranchers to be given the right to PROCESS THEIR OWN FOOD. This should move quickly.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the documents he referenced or which existing food-safety regulations Trump hopes to waive.
Covering the cyclospora outbreak, crop scientist and former NC ag commissioner candidate Sarah Taber “Farm2Taber” was explaining how the USDA inspections are already so lax and industry captured that companies basically rely on 3rd party inspections to make sure the veg they’re buying are actually not going to make their customers sick. Or it comes down to state health departments that actually have rigorous track and trace programs.
So the reason Taco Bell was one of the first companies to report where the bad lettuce was coming from was because they have money invested into to tracking where their produce is coming from and winding up. And it wasn’t until folks in one of the great lake states (I think Michigan but don’t hold me to that) started getting sick and their state health department went into action that a proper epidemiology picture started to emerge for that region.
The federal regulators are already in the pocket of big industry, and our top civilian leadership wants to make it worse!
Which makes me think something like what Trump’s proposing here woild be an absolute death knell for these producers, kind of akin to Bolsonaro trying to gut Brazil’s department of the environment. These agencies are already completely captured, why even take the publicity and marketing hit for doing something like this?
MAGA is largely a movement of small business tyrants who are mad about larger businesses outcompeting them. Their belief is that these large businesses can outcompete them because of regulation and Wokeness, since any actual analysis would require understanding and skepticism of capitalism.