As beef prices hit record highs across the United States, ranchers are warning that these elevated costs might be here to stay. The unprecedented surge in beef prices is being felt by consumers and producers alike, raising concerns about the long-term stability of the market.
Rancher Scott Hayes from Missouri highlighted the challenges facing the beef industry. Hayes, who has been in the ranching business for over two decades, noted that a combination of factors is driving up prices.
“Feed costs have skyrocketed, and the droughts we’ve experienced have severely impacted our pastures,” Hayes explained. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain our herds and produce the quality beef consumers expect.”
According to Hayes, the rising costs of feed and other inputs, coupled with labor shortages, are pushing prices to levels never seen before. The supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have further exacerbated these issues, leading to higher prices at the grocery store.
Rancher Shad Sullivan told The Epoch Times that the sharp rise in prices can be attributed to a “withering assault” from regulators and government authorities who have played an outsized role in the unprecedented increase.
“We are seeing prices at an all-time high, and it is getting close to that point when the consumer is going to say, I can’t do this anymore; it’s just too costly,” said Sullivan. “They (officials and regulators) are trying to push these high prices as a new norm where meat is only a treat for the wealthy. That is where they are pushing us, and that is where we are going.”
Consumers are feeling the pinch as the price of beef continues to climb. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) indicated that beef prices have risen by over 20% in the past year alone. This increase is particularly hard on families who rely on beef as a staple in their diet.
Producers, too, are struggling. Many ranchers are finding it difficult to cover their costs, let alone make a profit. The financial strain is causing some to consider downsizing their operations or exiting the industry altogether.
“We’re doing everything we can to manage costs, but there’s only so much we can do,” Hayes said. “The reality is that these high prices might be the new norm for the foreseeable future.”
The Bill Gates Factor
According to The Epoch Times, the nation’s most prolific farmland owner is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and an anti-meat activist. By 2023, Mr. Gates claimed he owned about 270,000 acres spread across 18 states.
Gates, an investor in Upside Foods, one of the two synthetic meat producers approved by the USDA, has been vocal about his belief that meat alternatives are needed to save the world from upcoming catastrophic climate events caused by greenhouse gasses.
In a 2021 interview with Technology Review, Gates said that all well-off nations need to switch to be completely weaned off of living, breathing cows.
“All rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” Gates told the interviewer. “Eventually that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift demand. So for meat in the middle-income-and-above countries, I do think it’s possible.”
Long-Term Consequences
The sustained increase in beef prices could have significant long-term consequences for the industry. Smaller, family-owned ranches are at particular risk, as they often lack the resources to weather prolonged periods of financial strain. This could lead to greater consolidation in the industry, with larger corporate entities gaining more control over beef production.
There are also concerns about the impact on consumer behavior. If prices remain high, more people may turn to alternative sources of protein, such as chicken or plant-based options. This shift could further disrupt the beef market and change consumption patterns in the United States.
Despite these challenges, Hayes remains cautiously optimistic. He believes that with the right support and policies, the industry can adapt and overcome these hurdles.
“We need policies that support ranchers and address the underlying issues driving up costs,” Hayes said. “With the right approach, we can stabilize prices and ensure that consumers continue to have access to high-quality beef.”
As the beef industry navigates these turbulent times, one thing is clear: the days of cheap beef may be behind us. Both producers and consumers will need to adapt to a new reality where high prices are the norm.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
