The Big Four beef packers are pocketing the drought-and-screwworm surcharge at Texas taco counters.
The price of barbacoa in San Antonio has been moving for two years. The reasons this publication’s reporting on the supply strain names — drought, low herd numbers, screwworm pressure — are real. They are not the whole story. The four companies that slaughter roughly 85 percent of the fed cattle in this country are the same four companies that took the margin in 2014, that took the margin in 2020, and that take the margin every quarter the industry reports. When the herd shrinks, the packer does not shrink. When the consumer’s bill rises, the packer’s gross margin rises with it.
Ground beef at the grocery in Wisconsin Rapids is over five dollars a pound right now. The same week Texas taco shops are absorbing the same pressure, the meat counter here is absorbing the same pressure. The supply chain is the same supply chain. A kid in this county eats burgers three nights a week; that math is the same math in Eagle Pass and Friendship.
Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket is the workingman’s book on the consolidated packer. The packer keeps the spread. The consolidated buyer does not pass cost back to the rancher or forward to the consumer in a transparent ratio when the cattle cycle tightens, when weather cuts the herd, or when a pest like the New World screwworm — now established in the U.S. South-west and working its way toward Texas cattle — adds cost. The taquero running a two-stool counter, the rancher with forty cows, the family in Eagle Pass, the family in Friendship — they pay.
Wendell Berry named the underlying problem in The Unsettling of America more than forty years ago: a system that treats the soil, the water, and the animal as expendable inputs, then acts surprised when the ecology breaks down and passes the bill to the people at the bottom of the ledger. Berry’s other sentence is the one I keep coming back to. When the rules are consolidated against the small operator, the small operator does not get to be efficient. The taquero cannot replace his cooler. The small rancher cannot replace his auction market — the local sales barn closed years back, the next one closed more recently, and he drives past the empty buildings to reach the single regional market still running. The consumer cannot replace the meat counter. The four firms set the terms. The drought and the screwworm are the weather the four firms sail in.
The “Big Four” — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef — control roughly 85 percent of fed-cattle slaughter. Tyson processes about one in five pounds of beef in the country. JBS, the Brazilian-owned firm, settled a 2020 U.S. class-action brought by wholesalers for $52.5 million and signed a separate leniency agreement with Brazilian prosecutors in the same price-fixing investigation. Cargill is the largest privately held company in the United States. National Beef rounds out the four. This is a documented oligopoly, not a competitive market. The four firms have the leverage to set both sides of the market — the price paid for the steer, the price charged for the boxed beef.
The U.S. cattle herd is at its smallest level in seventy-five years — 86.2 million head as of January 1, 2026, the lowest since 1951, per USDA. The drought across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas has culled herds for three straight years. The New World screwworm, driven out of the country in 1966, is back. None of this is news the packer didn’t anticipate. The four firms have been buying less cattle at lower cash prices while charging consumers more for boxed beef, every month, on the public record. The Packers and Stockyards Division at USDA has documented the spread widening. The Government Accountability Office has documented it. The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund has documented it. The structural-not-incidental claim holds: the margin capture is built into the architecture.
Those of us who split a locally raised steer every fall are watching the same math play out in our own driveways. The local rancher charges more because his hay and feed costs are up; the corporate buyer at the regional feedlot pays less for the thin calves because he knows the rancher has to sell before the winter. This year, we are trading out the brisket for chuck and stretching the burger meat just to make the quarter-share last. The middle class of the cattle economy — the independent rancher, the local butcher, the neighborhood family buying a quarter of beef — is being hollowed out by a model that concentrates the profit at the top and the risk at the bottom.
The “leave us alone” rhetoric in either place is rhetoric addressed to a market that does not, structurally, leave anyone alone. The taquero absorbs the price hike to keep his regulars. The small rancher accepts the lower cash price because the next buyer is ninety miles away. The squeeze is the design. The Mazola piece that ran in this paper a week ago showed the same Hispanic shopper being squeezed from every direction — cooking oil down, beef up, the labor market that pays for both tightening at the same time. The squeeze is not a market event. The squeeze is the design.
A real rural food economy would rebuild the independent processing capacity that the monopoly has systematically dismantled. Reinstating mandatory country-of-origin labeling, repealed in December 2015 under packer pressure after WTO rulings against it. Passing the Cattle Price Discovery and Competition Act, which would force the four firms to buy a percentage of their cattle on the cash market instead of in captive supply. Reopening the Packers and Stockyards rulemaking that the previous administration killed. Letting small processors and mobile slaughter units operate under state-inspected retail-sales rules across state lines — the PRIME Act, bipartisan, eleven years stalled. A state-inspection cooperative so local processors can actually sell across the county line. The DOJ and USDA reopened antitrust investigations into the four firms in 2026. The lever is moving for the first time in a decade. None of these are exotic. They are the same corrective levers the Farm Bureau, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, and Wendell Berry have been pulling on for thirty years. They have lost because the four firms have spent the money to make them lose.
The taquero in Laredo is not going to stop making barbacoa. The mother in Eagle Pass is not going to stop feeding her family. A kid in this county is going to keep wanting burgers. What is being taken is the difference between what the four firms pay and what they sell for. The drought and the screwworm are the weather they sail in. Adams County and South Texas are the same water.