Michael Beard

If you allow government officials and politicians to start a war outside of Constitutional boundaries without accountability, they can also take your guns, your land, and your freedom, without accountability. The trouble with supporting government actors who exceed their Constitutional authority based on their popularity is that the only protection you, the individual citizen, has against government action is the Constitution. Our country is not founded on presuming the "goodwill" of elected or appointed officials. Our country is founded upon rules and limitations of authority designed to preserve the freedoms of individual citizens.

An open letter to Secretary Rollins and President Trump: Ranchers are tired of press releases that put us “first” and checks that only go to packers and corp ag. I am not writing just to list problems; I have solutions but you won’t hear them from the Cattlemen’s Association or Farm Bureau; they’ll fight all of it. They sold out to packers, feedlots, and corporate interests long ago. If you truly want to help, here’s how: Loans do not make land affordable. Stop corporate grants and start land grants. Expanded FSA lending injects subsidized buying power into a fixed supply of land. Prices rise. Sellers pocket the subsidy. A loan lets a young rancher pay an unaffordable price at the top of the cattle cycle. It does not change the price. Recruiting new entrants into leveraged land and cattle at record highs sets them up for the same wreck that buried the people who bought at the 2014 peak. Stop adding debtors. Offer land-purchase grants to existing small operators (under 300 head), with a deed restriction: the land stays in ag production. AND STOP all foreign solar from overtaking existing lands/ leases from ranchers like @caseymurph1 via reg. rather than singular interventions. Subsidize his lease, don’t hand it to a foreigner. Insurance subsidies help only corp ag. Kill it. LRP premium support is per head, dollars go to large feedlots and the operators with staff and agent relationships. The BRAND heifer endorsement will do the same. A forty-cow outfit is not buying two-year retention endorsements. Corporate dairies will bank and not change operations at all. Kill that program as it is all theory, no play. Small producers are locked out of the market: prosecute it. Four packers control roughly 85 percent of fed cattle slaughter. As set out below, broadline distributors lock restaurants into prime-vendor deals require all purchases through them, with penalties for buying elsewhere. Grocers hand category management to dominant suppliers who control the shelf. A local rancher can raise better beef at a fair price and still cannot get it through the door because the buyer is punished for taking it. Even the famous Cattlemen’s Steakhouse located in thenOKC stockyards won’t buy beef direct from local ranchers; it all comes from an out of state supplier. The Packers and Stockyards Act was written to stop exactly this. Courts hollowed it out. Enforcement slept. Finalize rules restoring individual-harm claims. Treat exclusivity agreements that penalize local product as unfair practices. Refer that conduct for prosecution, not another settlement. Restore mandatory country-of-origin labeling. Product of USA is voluntary. Voluntary labels protect no one. Congress repealed MCOOL in 2015. Every package of beef, and every product containing beef, should state where the animal was born, raised, slaughtered, and processed. Any product containing foreign beef should carry double the import duty. Families will buy American when they can see it. Imported product should not undercut it on price behind a USA label. Fund processing small ranchers can afford. SPUR’s shift from grants to guaranteed loans hands thin-margin plants more debt. No small rancher can afford a $500,000 inspected brick-and-mortar plant. Grant on-farm and mobile processing trailers. Pair them with remote and video-assisted USDA inspection so one inspector can cover multiple units without driving four hours between them. Inspector availability, not food safety, is what keeps small inspected slaughter out of reach. Make federal procurement mandatory. “Encouraging” agencies to buy locally processed American beef does nothing. Require it, with set-asides for small producers. The herd is at a 75-year low because the economics were rigged against those doing the work. Fix the market, we’ll fix the herd. @Okie_Rancher @SecRollins @USDA @DonaldTrump