← Kibbe on Liberty
Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 356 | Where’s the Beef: In Argentina or America? | Guest: Rep. Thomas Massie
00:57:43
Matt Kibbe sits down for a marathon conversation with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to discuss President Trump’s plans to import Argentinian beef.
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A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty.
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This week, a marathon conversation with Congressman Thomas Massie. Because the House is shut down, the government is shut down, he has some time to talk about one of his favorite subjects, the beef industrial complex and.
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What the government could do to free.
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Up American cattle producers to put better beef on your table instead of just importing from Argentina. Be sure to stay tuned for the.
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Second episode where we're going to get into Gaza.
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Epstein and the coalition of people trying.
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To take out Congressman Massie. Check it out. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty, Congressman, good to see you again.
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C
Good to see Matt.
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A
We got to stop doing this. Yeah, but that. The reason you're here today is because the government has now been shut down for 21, 22 days. Has anyone noticed?
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C
Not too many people have noticed. I mean, so far they've figured out ways to pay a lot of the folks who otherwise wouldn't get paid. I think when we hit that next paycheck, which is at the end of this month, which would be day 30 or 31, I think it'll get more real.
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A
Yeah. Because certain things kick in and it starts to hurt. Yeah. But I don't want to talk about that now. But I'm sort of happy about the government shutdown. I mean, as a libertarian, I should always be happy when the government's not functioning properly. But because it's not working, you're available to have a conversation, which is pretty cool. We've been trying to do this for a while and I thought since you are available, we should do like a marathon. We're going to solve all the problems in one sitting, which. And there's a lot of problems. I don't know if you've noticed, but. And we'll do this as a two part thing. And I want to get into foreign policy and your reelect and some of the people that you've pissed off. But right now, let's talk about something that we could do that's positive. Freeing American beef and freeing American cattle producers. And this has all been triggered. It's hot news right now because President Trump has said as part of his efforts to help bail out Javier Milei in Argentina, he wants us to import more Argentinian beef. And your response was, well, what about American beef? Yeah, what about American beef?
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C
Well, I think the President is trying to kill two birds with one stone. He's trying to bail out Argentina, but he's also trying to do something about the inflation that we're seeing at the supermarket. And so, you know, if you have a dollar that you made four years ago. That dollar is worth 20 cents less today. And it's even more so the fact if you're going to the store and trying to buy beef because beef prices are going up. So the president said, hey, we'll just bring in all this beef from Argentina. That'll solve Argentina's problems and then that'll solve the prices at the supermarket. The problem with that is it's not enough revenue to solve Argentina's problems. They're talking about a $40 billion bailout down there and in the supermarkets. It may be a quick fix, but it's not going to work long term because the problem is a lot deeper than that. You have a lot of cattle farms that have gone out of business and you have a lot of local processors that process the beef that have been consolidated into one of four big meat processing companies that control 85% of the market. So that's something we should dive into, I think, is why is beef so high? But first of all, to address your question, the president's proposal isn't going to solve the problem long term, either of the two problems that he's trying to solve, unfortunately. By the way, my, I know you're here to grill me, but my beef is not with the president. It's with his policy.
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A
Right, right. Nice, nice. Because I sent out an X post asking people who should I talk to about solving the problem of escalating beef prices. Because I like steak and as far as I can tell, the price of a steak at Costco and I buy the whole side. And I know you farm local guys don't appreciate that I buy my stick at Costco, but it's a price point for me and I'm sure the price of prime rib has doubled.
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C
By the way, we should disclose at this point that you did once buy some beef from me.
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A
Yes.
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C
That may or may not have been stamped by the USDA and may or.
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May not have been illegally run across state lines.
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C
That's right.
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A
And may or may not have been grilled and delicious on. On my very own grill. And by this is kind of the point, I would rather buy that beef.
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C
Right. But right now it's hard to do unless you're willing to have an illicit transaction. According to the federal government, it's hard to buy directly from farmers. But that, that gets to what the actual solution is here. So you have the number of cattle in the United States is at an all time low since it's not been this low since the 1960s. And cattle are cyclical the price of cattle. And I'm talking about the price at the farm. Now the price at the farm isn't always the price at the supermarket. There are things that get in between that, like the price of corn and the price of soybeans, which are two of the things that are fed to cattle to finish them. If you're buying them at Costco, if you're buying them for me, it's grass that they're finished on. But no, I won't, I won't.
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A
You know, we can argue about that in a minute.
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C
All right, I won't poke you too much on that one, but. And I would never steer you wrong.
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D
Sorry.
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C
So you know cattle inventories at all?
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A
You're calling me into submission.
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C
Don't be bullied though. Cattle inventories are all time low and they're going down. And here's why. It's hard to turn on a dime. The amount of cattle that are in the United States as contrast with poultry. So a chicken, if you want to have meat in the supermarket, you have to plan eight weeks in advance from the time the, the egg is laid until that bird is butchered and goes to freezer camp. We call it is eight weeks. Now for, for a hog, it's on the order of months. It's a few months between the time that sow has, you know, the hog, the piglets or whatever, and then you butcher the hog. For cattle, it's about two years, sometimes longer than that between when the calf is born and when it's butchered. And also with cattle, they haven't been mechanized and industrialized in the way that chickens have. You need one cow to have one calf, right? They may occasionally have a twin, but that's a very rare occurrence. Whereas with hogs, they have a whole litter. I don't raise hogs, so I don't know what they're called. Maybe it's not a litter, but. And with, you know, with birds, you can, a chicken can lay an egg every day. So with a cow, the gestation period is almost identical to humans. So the most that the most steers or calves, beef animals that one cow, one adult grown female cow can produce in a year is one. And when that calf is born, it can go into two different streams. It can. And I'm not talking about dairy cattle. They're a different breed here. And there is some overlap. Like if you, if a dairy cow is fully depreciated and not producing as much milk, she will go into the beef supply. So there's a little Bit of connection there, but not a whole lot. So when a cow on your farm has that one year event, has that calf, that calf can either go into beef, into the pipeline, where it goes to usually a feedlot if you're getting it from Costco, or it can stay.
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On the farm if it's a female.
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So this only works for half of the animals that are born once a year to a cow.
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They would have a female calf, and.
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That one can go either to Costco.
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Or it can stay on the farm and have its own calf. But again, that's going to take like.
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That heifer is going to be almost.
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Two years old before you breed her.
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And then in the third year, she will have that calf. So you can see this is like an aircraft carrier.
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When you have a herd on a farm, it's not like you decide how many eggs to hatch this month, and then two months from now, you'll have that much chicken. This is on the order of two or three years to steer this.
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Okay.
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By the way, I have to pull this out. But sometime in 2020, when you and I were doing all those shows on lockdowns, you were always sort of playing the role of Nostradamus, where you literally predicted precisely this problem with lockdowns.
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C
Yeah, I'm getting chill bumps because I remember that I was pointing out that the supply chain for some foods is three years long and that what we were doing during COVID in terms of planting an apple tree, it's going to take three or four years for that, sometimes five or six years for that apple tree to bear fruit. And if during COVID you're paying people to stay home and not plant apple trees, you're affecting the price of apples five years from now. The same thing when you slaughter the dairy herd, because they didn't have the facility, the school was closed, and they couldn't redirect that milk because it was in cartons for school children, not for moms at the supermarket. So they destroyed dairy cattle, which were going to take two or three years to build back up. And so you had a lot of weird things going on during COVID and we're still seeing the tail of that, no pun intended, right now. So back to, back to the beef. So here's what happens when the price that the farmer sees of beef cattle goes up. So there's, there's kind of two kinds of cattlemen. There are the, the brood stockers, the ones that have the mama cows, and they typically don't finish the calves. They, they might sell them at one year old and ship them to another type of farmer that feeds them for a year or six months to get them up to weight in order to butcher. So, but, so I'll be talking about the, the cow calf operator. That's the ones that keep the cows and then have the calves. Well, when a cow calf operator, and they're the ones who are faced with this decision, not the feedlot, the feedlot gets a heifer or steer and they don't breed them. Once they get to the feedlot, they're going to Costco. Okay? The cow calf operator, when the price of beef gets high, has that decision to make every year with the new heifers. Am I going to sell it to the feedlot or am I going to keep it on my farm? Well, when the price of that the feedlot is willing to pay goes up, the, the farmer who keeps the brood cows is more incentivized, at least in the near term, to sell them to the feedlot. So let's say a farmer can get $1,000 typically in a year for a heifer. He might say, well, I'm just going to keep that heifer and make her into a brood cow. But if that price goes to two or even $3,000, the farmer would almost have to be insane to keep that and try for another couple years and try to turn it into a brood cow. So it is cyclical.
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What happens is when the price that.
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The farmer sees of cattle goes up.
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The, the farmer sells more of his inventory. He may even take that eight year old cow who was two months late having her calf this year, and so she's not as productive as the other.
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Cows in the herd.
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He may say, you're going to be hamburger.
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And so not only do you have.
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The new heifers going into the food stream, you have the cull cows being culled at an earlier age. So the capacity to produce beef goes down when the price of cattle goes up. And this continues and continues until it gets so out of whack that somebody says, you know what? I'm going to pay $4,000 for a.
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One year old heifer and three years.
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From now I'll be in the cattle business because I think this is going to continue.
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And so, but we're, and so it's a, it's a cyclical thing and we're.
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In the longest cycle that we've ever seen in the United States. It's been, it's been going up for I think over a decade now. And inventories have been Going down. And part of that is because the government's making it harder to raise cattle and to get them processed. And also another part of that is it's just not as profitable now.
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And again, this is where the imports come into play.
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If the president makes it less profitable to be a cattle farmer because he's somehow, I don't know what his plan is, but he's proposed to buy more beef from Argentina, which means he's planning to do something that's not free market. He's planning to incentivize beef purchases from Argentina.
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C
I think.
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If he does that, he's going to disincentivize the young farmer or the would be farmer in the United States who's in his 20s and thinking about taking over the family farm. Are we going to divide this farm into a subdivision or, or will we keep raising cattle here? And if he sees a bunch of beef coming from Argentina right when prices would be high to the farmer and incentivize him to get into the business, he may not get into the business. So that will perpetuate the problem. I saw somebody, you'll like this, as a free market libertarian, somebody on the.
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C
Internet yesterday said that high prices of cattle solve the problem of high prices of cattle. Like eventually more people get into the market when the price goes up, right? So there you have it. That's why it's cyclical. That is why right now cattle prices are high. There's another factor in here that I don't do the, the feedlot thing. I don't feed my animals grain. I do finish some of my steers and heifers and sell them locally as grass fed. But there's another dynamic that's kind of strange. When the price of corn and soybeans goes down for other market reasons, the demand for those one year old calves goes up because the people who have corn want something to do with their corn. And instead of making ethanol with it, they may make beef with it. And so it's kind of weird how this happens. When the price of corn goes up, the price that the cow calf operator sees for a calf goes down. Because what's happened, the, the overall price at the supermarket of beef went up because corn is such a large component of it. And so then consumer demand went down and then there's less demand for calves to go to the feedlot. So it's, it's a little, it's not that complicated, but at first blush it's not intuitive. And this is why you get into these cycles. And this is why right now, the last thing in the world do you want to do is artificially bring down the price of cattle in the United States, because that's what should eventually get more people to raise cattle. There's two things, legislative answers that I have here to the problem. One of them is, and you may not consider this to be very libertarian, I think we should bring back country of origin labeling. There's two stages you could do that in. You could either have mandatory country of origin labeling. We used to have this until 2015. And the WTO, World Trade Organization said that the United States was violating GATT General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs because we were requiring beef that was raised outside the United States to be labeled differently. The argument, this is a really bizarre argument that they used to say we were discriminating against foreign beef when we put the label on it was that it would require the feedlot to have another set of pins for the. The animals from Mexico and Canada that they were going to feed out. And that that would. Because ultimately you're going to have to label that beef separately if the animal was born outside of the United States. So to label it separately, you have to keep track of it separately. And to do that costs money.
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So they said, we're imposing a cost.
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On animals from Canada and Mexico that.
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Animals in the United States don't have.
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And so the WTO said, you got to get rid of your country of origin labels.
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And in the United States.
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And basically they told Congress to jump. And Congress said, how high? And I think it was all but eight Republicans voted to get rid of country of origin labeling.
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And I was one of those eight.
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That said, no, let's keep it. Because if, and here's my conspiracy theory.
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That it wasn't really Canada and Mexico that were inspired to bring this lawsuit against the United States. I think it was the meat packers, because they realized if they could buy calves cheaper, they could make and sell the beef at the same price at the supermarket.
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They would, you know, they would calves.
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Or animals, fed out animals and sell it at the supermarket. By the way, the label would still say USDA.
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Most people go to the supermarket.
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U.S. department of Agriculture. Well, that must be from the United States, right? So I think the meat packers put Canada and Mexico up to bringing. Put them up to bringing this lawsuit and then persisted all those years until we eventually lost. Now I think we're a sovereign country. Those judges at the WTO are not in my copy of the Constitution. I mean, the Supreme Court is supposed to be the Supreme Court. There's not supposed to be a court more supreme than the Supreme Court. Yet that's what the WTO pretends to be. And this is. I remember President Trump's first inaugural speech. I was there listening to it and so inspired that he was. He was just telling the WTO to get lost, like we were going to put America first and do what was good for America. And that was, you know, 2017, January 2017. And I was so excited because in 2015 is when we had lost country of origin labeling, but we never brought it back, by the way.
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C
And I won't go on too much about country of origin labeling, but to complete this, I said there's two stages of labeling you can have. You can either have mandatory country of origin labeling, or you could have volunteer. You could have discretionary country of origin labeling, but have some rules around it. You can't bring an animal from Mexico a day before you're going to butcher it, take the hide off of it, cut it up and call it USA Beef, because it was butchered in the United States. That's the sort of thing you would want to avoid, but you can't really avoid unless you have some sort of rules around the labeling. And states could implement those rules, but then the federal government would probably say, oh, you can't do that. So it's really up to the federal government. So when they. In 2015, I went to the Rules Committee and offered an amendment to the bill that was going to repeal mandatory country of origin labeling. And I offered a voluntary country of origin labeling guidelines that the federal government would put in place. And they wouldn't even let me have a vote on that amendment. And ironically, the voluntary country of origin labeling was a Paul Ryan bill originally, and he was the speaker who wouldn't allow the vote on it. If I'm remembering it correctly, it was a bunch of the people who were chairman and in charge who had drafted the legislation that I offered as an amendment when they got rid of mandatory country of origin label. Here's why you want labeling. If the US Farmer can't differentiate a superior product from what is probably an inferior product. Now, there may be Kobe beef that's even better, you know, or brings a higher price. You can be damn sure they're going to label that Kobe beef, right? From Japan or whatever.
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A
But I bought that at the Costco, too. Sorry.
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C
And that was probably from Australia. They're the biggest ranchers for Wagyu cattle, which are the cattle that are raised in Japan in the Kobe prefecture. This is. Now we're getting into some other area where if you call it Kobe and it's not from the Kobe prefecture, that's like calling your Virginia whiskey bourbon. And it's not from Kentucky, like which is a whole other set of labeling stuff. But the reason you country of origin labeling would help us farmers is because there are customers who when they go to the supermarket, if they're steaks and they're not labeled, they will still buy the steak. And they're not, they're probably not going to go up to the cashier at Kroger's and demand to know, you know, get your, get your butcher out here. I want to know where this beef came from. There's no label on it. Right. It's a little inconvenient when you're trying to get ready for the little league picnic and cook hamburgers or whatever. So. But if they go to the supermarket.
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D
And there's one that says USA Beef.
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And there's one that says product of.
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Argentina, well then they may put a higher premium on the USA Beef because maybe they trust our farmers, maybe they want to help our farmers. Maybe they know it's probably likely to be more fresh if it's from the United States instead of having shipped from somewhere else. You would almost all that would have to be frozen to get here if you're shipping it from overseas or outside of the country.
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C
But that would help farmers country of origin labeling. And in 2015, by the way, I told you, we're in about a 10 year cycle of cattle prices going up. They in 2015 is when they dropped because for American farmers, cattle prices went down. They could no longer differentiate their product. The meat packers could buy Mexican and Canadian animals and butcher those and slapped the USDA sticker on them. So demand for U.S. calves, you know, stockers, one one year old, whatever, eight months old, went down. But since then they've been, by the.
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Way, I remember those, those were the salad days, so to speak. Because I was buying grass fed beef from Whole Foods.
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C
Yeah.
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Instead of mystery beef from Costco. So I was just loving it.
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C
The good old days if you're a consumer. But they didn't last very long because what happened is a lot of cattle farmers went out of business in the United States and they said this isn't worth it. We're losing dozens of cattle farmers every month.
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A
Yeah.
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B
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A
This business cycle, I would just go back to this business cycle where it fluctuates. And this is a classic problem in farming generally, as I understand it. But as a libertarian who's skeptical about regulatory capture and the big beef industrial complex, I don't know much about them, but I know they're there and I know they're screwing up everything. How much of it is government mucking around with prices or barriers to entry or regulatory requirements? And we'll get into your prime act, but what else is going on there?
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C
You know, the cattle industry. I'm a farmer, by the way. I think we've already disclosed this. A cattle farmer. I don't have very many cattle. They're like maybe 4, 50 million cattle in the United States and I own 50 of them. So when people say you're self dealing, I say, well, I get one millionth of the benefit of whatever this bill does. If you don't count pork and lamb, which I don't raise. Right. So I must be the most inefficient self dealer in the world. I've also yet to really make money on my cattle. I haven't yet paid off the investment in the hay equipment, the fences, the land, the barns, the squeeze chute, the corral gates, the hay rings. You know, I still haven't paid for all that stuff yet. The truck to pull the trailer.
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A
And you've been doing this what about a decade?
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C
Two decades? 2003 is when I first bought cattle. And so I've been doing it, what is that, 22 years?
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A
So the return on investment, at least for you when it comes to cattle farming is not great.
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C
No, but full disclosure, this could be the first year I make money because we're in that cycle. We're at that point where although your.
- [28:29]
A
Political opponents are going to clip that and put it in an attack, although.
- [28:34]
C
So I could make money if I sold a bunch of my herd. But there's also an aspect of gambling in farming where you, where you say, you know what, this could keep up for a few years. So instead of selling my heifers to the meat packers or to Matt Kibbe after I raised them on grass, maybe I should keep them and double the Size of my herd over the next couple years, maybe even lease some of the neighbor's farm or buy hay from somewhere else and pasture more of my land instead of raising it in hay. And so, you know, there's a decision to make here. So the reality is I probably won't make money this year on my farm either. Maybe the cattle part of it will make money. Okay, so back to the thing on what. What is government doing that's meddling with it? And is there regulatory capture? Yes. This is my second legislative Solution. So in 2015, I told you country of origin labeling went away because my colleagues were scared of the World Trade Organization and. Or got donations from the meat packers and. Or the National Cattlemen Beef association sold out the farmers and. Or Farm Bureau sold out the farmers and anyways, in 2015, it was pretty.
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D
Dire year for cattlemen.
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A
So you're saying there was a herd mentality establishment.
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C
So I was prodded to do something legislatively that.
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D
And what I recognized was this problem that we still have four meat packers controlled 85% of the meat processed in the United States. One of them is owned by China, that's Smithfield. They do mostly pork. And the other is owned by Brazil. And that's. They're trying to get listed, I think, on one of our stock exchanges to kind of legitimize it. But they're a Brazilian company completely, and it's called jbs. And they. And they've got facilities. Both of those have facilities in Kentucky.
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Right.
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D
So I'm kind of step stepping on some toes here to talk about.
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A
So no PAC contributions.
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D
I don't. The National Cattlemen's Beef association has boycotted any donations to me.
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C
And it.
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D
Which is ironic because, like I am for the cattlemen in Kentucky. The problem is they mostly represent the meat packers, in my opinion, although temporarily. Right now, in order to keep their membership happy, they are taking the side of farmers and ranchers on this Argentina issue. I've noticed, but I'm not sure how sincere that is and how long that will last. What they would probably be okay with is instead of bringing in Argentina beef, if we brought in Argentina cattle and let the meat processors make their money on that, then the Cattlemen Beef association will. The lobbyists, that's who I'm talking about, will be okay with it because they'll get their cut. But right now, what the president is proposing is not to bring the cattle here and let the processors make money on it, but to bring the beef here.
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C
Okay, so. And I think that's what he's proposing. So the, there's the four meat packers that control 85% of the meat processed in the United States. And if you want to start your own little processing company, this looks like a great little facility here for it. You know, locally you have to comply with all the same regulations that the Oscar Mayer wiener factory has to comply with. Which means the size of the floor drain has to be 6 inches. You know, you have to have separate bathrooms and offices for the federal government employees who will be in your building sniffing and poking the carcass. That's by the way, that's how they determine if it's safe or not. Does it smell good and how does it poke? That's how the government determines it.
- [32:46]
A
Joel Salatin went through this explicitly because he wanted to process beef on Polyface.
- [32:52]
C
Yeah. So Joel Salatin is part owner in a federal licensed inspected facility so that he can sell by the cut legally. He's big enough now, he has to do it by the law. And so right now there are small custom house.
- [33:10]
A
I thought he was an anarchist.
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C
Well, I'm not going to out him. I'm not saying he's completely compliant. I go to his farm at least once a year and speak at something called the rogue food conference. And you'll not see that posted. Like I've spoke at like five rogue food conferences and never made a social media post. So it's not always, it's not always at his farm. Usually it's actually somewhere else, but he's usually there.
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A
But by the way, when I wanted to talk to somebody, I asked on X, I never finished this, thought I wanted to talk to somebody about the high cost of beef and what free market solutions we could push to fix the problem. Everyone that didn't say Thomas Massie said Joel Salatin. So you guys are sort of the OG even though he's a little more OG than you.
- [34:01]
C
Well, this morning at like 4am I woke up thinking about this problem and I.
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A
Of course you did.
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C
And I found a video I didn't know Joel Salatin had made. It's like a 12 minute video promoting the Prime Act. And so I posted that on social media. I mean, I can't believe I didn't know it was out there. He did a really good job of explaining it. I won't do as well, even though it's my legislation, but I'll try to explain how it addresses the regulatory capture. So right now there exists a loophole that allows me to sell beef using a custom facility that doesn't Have a USDA inspector. And that loophole says that people are allowed to butcher their own animals. So if I wanted to legally sell you meat, I could do it by selling you the animal itself. Take it to the processor, tell them this is Matt Kibbe's animal, and he.
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D
Wants his T bones 2 inches thick. He wants his stew meat.
- [35:08]
C
He, you know, he wants the, the.
- [35:10]
D
Arm roast ground into hamburger. He wants to keep the chuck roast.
- [35:15]
C
But you got to buy all those cuts.
- [35:18]
D
Even though I know you like steak, you got.
- [35:21]
C
You're even going to go home with the liver.
- [35:23]
A
Okay, I just want the ribeyes. That's all I want.
- [35:26]
C
Well, maybe we can work something out and I'll take the other guy. But there's a loophole that says Matt.
- [35:34]
D
Kibbe is allowed to butcher his own animal or pay somebody to butcher his own animal.
- [35:39]
C
I would, I would guess probably a million families in the United States use this loophole. Not, not 100 million families, but a million families. The, the families who have enough money in their bank account that they can spend 800 or $1,000 to buy a quarter of an animal. So Matt Kibbe can be partners with, you know, up to three other families. So that instead of paying $4,000 for the meat, you're paying $1,000 for the meat. But you have to have the means not only to pay $1,000 for meat, but to store it at your house in a freezer and hope that the power doesn't go off for more than two days or now you've lost your thousand dollar investment and you have to be willing to eat all the cuts that you don't typically buy, which is pretty inefficient. I mean, this is the great thing about a supermarket or Costco is if you just want to buy rib eye, you can go buy their. You can go buy the ribeye out of 10 animals. Right. And let somebody else buy the hamburger. Well, that's not the deal you get if you're using this loophole. Okay? So because this loophole exists, and because hundreds of thousands, maybe a million families use this loophole to buy beef directly from a farmer, custom slaughterhouses do exist. They also process, for instance, wild game like deer or elk. When. When a hunter gets that, typically a custom house will do that because that's your animal, too. You're allowed to eat the animal you kill and pay somebody else to process it for you. Okay? So there's like this dual path for meat. It can either go to a custom slaughterhouse or it can go to a USDA facility. Well, all of the small USDA facilities, because there's overhead associated with them, a lot of those have consolidated and JBS and places like Smithfield buy those facilities. Maybe buy them and shut them down. Just you don't have to compete with them or buy them and use them.
- [37:46]
D
And then.
- [37:48]
C
So what's happened is the average size of a USDA facility keeps getting bigger and bigger. That was the problem during COVID Like you got all these workers in there who may also be staying in dormitories. And during COVID it went, went through the cruise ships, the nursing homes and the meat packing facilities the quickest. Covid did and they shut down. And that's why you had animals being euthanized during COVID instead of being processed. There was some enterprising people from my.
- [38:17]
D
County who drove up to Ohio and.
- [38:18]
C
They were buying hogs for 50 bucks.
- [38:20]
D
And bringing them home and getting the job done.
- [38:23]
C
Because those hogs were going to go into a wood chipper. Literally, they're going to be euthanized. And it would cost more to dispose of the animal.
- [38:32]
D
And people say, well, why don't you. Why wouldn't the farmer just keep the hog until Covid was over? Well, these animals are bred for production and you know, at four months they're a certain size and it. And a hog, a year old hog, is already geriatric and having like, it's obese, it's not able to walk. And it's just not humane to keep an animal that's designed to gain weight so quickly to try to keep that animal around.
- [38:57]
C
It's also.
- [38:58]
D
They also quit producing more meat and they just start producing fat. You still got to feed them and you're getting nothing for it other than feces, which is another problem. And if you're going to keep stay in business, the supermarket wants one that's a few months old.
- [39:14]
C
So you got to make room for those anyways. All right, so you got the dual path. And here's the problem with the dual path. I can't sell you a ribeye using my local processor because I got to sell you half the animal. Now, you know, millions of people are eating these animals half at a time. They're not getting sick. They wouldn't get sick eating the rib eye. If they're eating the liver, the rib eye, the roast and the hamburger, what's the problem with just selling a ribeye? So my prime act says that if you're not involved in interstate commerce, if you're only having an animal processed at a local facility. And you don't plan to sell it in interstate commerce, that is the farmers in Kentucky, the processors in Kentucky, and the transaction happens in Kentucky, the customers in Kentucky. You could sell rib eyes in a restaurant, you could sell them in a grocery store, or you could sell them directly to the consumer if you're a farmer. And with the one that I always like, the objection I always hear is, oh my gosh, imagine the liability to the farmer in that situation. Yeah, wouldn't it be wonderful? Like, you know, the farmer is motivated to produce a healthy animal because the consumer is going to know who raised it. And the consumer is motivated to know who's raising it. And most of the farmers I know will gladly take on that liability. Because what the USDA is doing when you go through that other path, they're laundering the liability and they're using the imprimatur of the government. So good luck suing anybody if you go to Jack in the Box and get sick. Good luck finding out who made you sick and getting some compensation for that. Because it's kind of like background checks on guns. Those are, in my opinion, there to protect the manufacturers. So the manufacturer can say, well, I didn't sell Psycho a gun. The government sold it to them. The government approved the transaction. It's the same thing with the usda.
- [41:33]
A
But the farmers would have the choice of assuming that liability because they could still sell the existing system.
- [41:39]
C
Yeah, you could still go into the existing system. And by the way, if there is a degree of liability, you already have it now when you're selling half an animal or a whole animal to a customer. And so farmers would gladly accept that. By the way, it's not even illegal for me to use a custom slaughterhouse to get hamburger made and give it away at a Little league game in the form of cooked hamburgers. Right. The USDA doesn't care. It only becomes illegal when you charge a penny for it. Now the USDA wants involved, and so it is regulatory. Capture the big guys. The more regulation, the better for them because it's keeping the little guys out. And so my primac gets around that. My primac has a few other nice features. It doesn't have a numerical limit, by the way. There is a. You can raise poultry and sell. I think it's up to 20,000 birds or 10,000 birds without. Without going through the USDA if your state allows it. And there's. That exemption is written into the federal code. There's no such exemption for cattle or pork. And I contemplated putting a numerical exemption in there. But then I thought about Obamacare, which said if you have more than 50 employees, you got to do this. And what that did is it kept small companies small. And if you're succeeding in producing healthy food, why would I want you to hit a barrier and then try to come up with ways to get around that barrier that are very costly? So the better limitation is that, and this is the constitutional aspect of it, the federal government, in my opinion, and in the opinion of our founders, had no authority to regulate intrastate commerce within the state. And that is what the bill facilitates is intra state commerce. My bill is in a way constitutionally redundant. I'm just saying the feds have no authority to regulate the transaction if it stays inside the state. And I'm not getting too crazy with that and trying to reassert the Constitution for everybody and just saying, all right, well, for the purposes of beef and pork and lamb and goat, this, we're going to adhere to the Constitution and the regulations will be at the state or local level. And if you think this is too radical, you better not go to Kroger's or supermarket or Costco or to or to a restaurant, even tonight to a steakhouse. There are steakhouses here in Washington, D.C. that cut up way more meat than any of these small customers in a night, in one night, than a small custom facility does in a day. So the level of regulation that's appropriate, I believe, is a level of regulation right now, which is you may be subject to a surprise inspection or your state may require inspecting you once a year, once every six months, or maybe your health department. The same people that go and inspect restaurants and supermarkets that are cutting up meat behind the counter, that you can use that same inspection regime and know that it's safe.
- [45:04]
A
So this I don't quite get. Like the liability argument feels pretty lame to me. And I'm wondering what the meat processing industrial complex, what are their most potent arguments against you? And is it, do they have credible arguments or do they just write checks to so many members of Congress that it's hard to get something like this done?
- [45:29]
D
They.
- [45:33]
C
I mean, you're asking me to argue against my own bill.
- [45:36]
A
I assume they make safety arguments.
- [45:39]
C
They do. They try to make safety arguments. And so let me rebut, they say, well, oh my gosh, you got to be kidding me. You going to let somebody buy beef straight from the farmer without the federal government making sure it's safe? Well, my answer to that is is twofold. Number one, all of the big recalls that you see, for E. Coli, where they have to recall by lot number, and they. And they don't even actually know which meat is tainted because they process so much that day in that lot, they may recall £100,000 of beef. Those are from their facilities. They're the ones who are getting people sick. And if you foia, this has been done. If you FOIA the USDA and say, how many cases are you aware of somebody getting sick from a custom facility that's not USDA inspected? Their answer is, we have no record of that. There's literally no record of it at the federal government. If you try to foia, did somebody ever get sick from the. The local place where they're selling half or a whole animal? I mean, oh, here's another argument that they make. They say, you will get us into a trade war because in order to buy beef from Mexico, it has to be USDA inspected. But now you're going to let farmers sell uninspected beef directly to consumers. And what will happen is, let's say Canada sues you at the World Trade Organization, and the World Trade Organization authorizes Canada to do retaliatory tariffs on, say, soybeans. So what they do is they scare the soybean farmers. This would be like the Farm Bureau's approach. They would say, who's in the tank for the meat packers? But they would say, oh, you're going to. In addition to saying, oh, one tainted, you know, one instance of tainted beef is going to ruin the industry for everybody if you do this and somebody gets hurt. But they will. They will also say that you're going to. You're going to trip off a trade war, and it's going to affect all farmers. Like, Canada will retaliate by. Or China will retaliate by tariffing soybeans, and then it'll all go to hell in a handbasket. So they scare other farmers. But the reality is most cattle farmers don't make enough money on cattle, if they make money at all these days. So they're also doing soybean and corn and other enterprises which rely on international trade. So they're particularly vulnerable to this argument. And so the lobbyists know that. So that's what they try to say. So my answer to that is, number one, you know, are we a sovereign country or not? Okay, that's where I start. And I would say we are a sovereign country, and we should. If you see what Trump's doing right now with tariffs, like, obviously, you can get away with a lot, and the least of our worries. This is what they also said for the country of origin labeling, that it violated trade laws and it would have started a trade war. If we didn't comply and take all the the country of origin labeling requirements off of our food, I would say, well, how come we haven't started a trade war over the 20,000 bird exemption for chickens? How come there's no trade war? Because we require seafood to be labeled. How come there's no trade war? Because probably a million families a year are using this other loophole to buy beef from local farmers through a custom slaughterhouse. Like, I'm not buying their argument about.
- [49:34]
A
That, but there's this thing that we like to say now called America first. And it strikes me that it would sort of make sense. Like, going back to the labeling thing, I would rather buy local beef, and for me it would be a quality thing. And I'd like to know where the beef came from. I have no idea where that slab of ribeye is I buy at Costco came from. And I'm hoping it's us. I don't know. But it strikes me that this president and this Congress has at least rhetorically embraced the idea of America first. So why would it be controversial to put American cattle farmers first?
- [50:18]
C
It shouldn't be. And that's what I'm saying. To label the country of origin is literally. It's not even putting America first. It's putting us on a playing field where you can decide in the supermarket if you're America first or not. Right. Like today, we don't even have the ability for an individual to put America first when they buy beef and pork. By the way, the country of origin label for this microphone exists, right. For the glasses that you're wearing. For the jacket that I have on the country of origin is labeled, for the boots that I'm wearing. What I'm asking for is not so radical to put America first by having a label on the beef and the pork.
- [51:05]
A
I'd like to know is someone that, like, if there's quality and price competition between American beef, between local beef and Argentinian beef and Argentina. Argentina is a very beef centric country, which is something I love about it. Not a lot of vegans in Argentina, but I'd like to know, as a consumer, I don't think that violates libertarian principles. I'm sure there's good ways and bad ways to encourage transparency and consumers could demand, so what is this? Because beef is not beef is not beef. Your grass finished beef on your farm is very different. Than what I'm getting at Costco. And it's not unfair to know.
- [51:50]
D
Right.
- [51:52]
C
And here's the other thing that's happening. Many years ago, I got on this organic kick before I realized, by the way, local is better than organic. Once I got into organic and thought about raising cattle organically and looked at some of the requirements, which just seemed to be ridiculous. And then some of the exceptions, they, they let you put two amino acids that are manufactured in a factory into organic chicken feed. Methionine and lysine, I think or something. Anyways, they, you can put that in organic chicken feed. And there's other things you can use GMO corn and stuff. Like it's, you can launder certain things that wouldn't be considered organic or things that you wouldn't want to have. You can still end up calling them organic. But when I went down the organic kick, and by the way, organics probably better than nothing. Okay. As far as the label goes there, there are some requirements there. I was in supermarket with my wife and I'm like, let's get this. It's organic. Let's get this. Oh, she bought, she pulled some apple juice and put it in the cart. I'm like, oh, that's not organic. And I put it back on the shelf and I found one that had the organic sticker and I put it in the cart. And as we're going down the aisle, I picked the apple juice up and I start looking at it. It says product of turkey. Like, wait, number one, don't we raise.
- [53:23]
D
Apples in the United States?
- [53:26]
C
Why does this have to be product of Turkey? And number two, do I trust the USDA inspector designees in Turkey to like?
- [53:37]
D
Because, you know, we're not sending USDA.
- [53:40]
C
Employees to Turkey like, or even compliance officers.
- [53:46]
D
It's got to be something that's been, no pun intended, farmed out to the Turkish people.
- [53:52]
C
And there are a lot of these.
- [53:54]
D
Countries where just a hundred dollar bill in your hand, you know, quietly passed is the equivalent of an inspection.
- [54:03]
A
Yeah. You might get a turkey of a bottle of juice. That was pretty tortured.
- [54:10]
C
Yeah, that didn't work for me. But so well, there's always going to be a bad apple in the bun. So anyways, I think the two things, just to summarize, that would solve the problem. We have two problems that I can't solve. Argentina's problem today. But as far as farmers going out of business and younger farmers deciding not to get into the business, there has to for the cycle to work for the cycle to Rebound. The prices do have to get high, at least for the farmer to see a high price, before you will have more farmers or before you will have farmers decide to put more of their land into production. So the two legislative fixes that I have country of origin labels, which is a mandate, mandatory country of origin labels, but it's a mandate on the foreign producers who are selling the products into the United States. And I think it's. Well, I know it's constitutional. You know, we're allowed to regulate trade. Congress, that's one of our authorities. And also to set standards for weights and measures, which is basically, this is what beef is. We could, for instance, I mean, again, the founders weren't complete libertarians. I think they were pragmatic libertarians. But they did say that the government can establish standards for weights and measures because that's a helpful thing, that maybe to have 16 ounces be a pound every same 16 ounces everywhere. But also maybe if you're selling something called milk or something called beef, that it has to comply with some biological definition of those things that's been established. So one country of origin labels would help farmers and would help consumers. Consumers could better differentiate what they're purchasing, and farmers in the United States could get a premium for a better product. The other legislative solution I have is the prime act. And this is addressing the issue of regulatory capture, where we have scale, prejudicial regulations. We need scale, appropriate regulation and the right scale for a local farmer selling to a local consumer is a local law, not a federal law.
- [56:31]
A
Okay, Free the beef is what you're saying? Yes, yes. So we're going to actually do a second episode where it's going to get more spicy because I want to talk about Israel. I want to talk about aipac. I want to talk about your views on foreign policy and why so many people from out of your state are spending millions of dollars to unelect you.
- [56:54]
C
And we might have to talk about the shutdown and Epstein.
- [56:58]
A
It all is the same thing. It's a big, beautiful mess. All right, stay tuned. Thank you.
- [57:05]
B
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.