Fox Segment Highlights Rising Beef Prices, Farmers Losing Money Due to Trump Tariffs

Fox Business host Stuart Varney spoke to correspondent Kelly Saberi on Monday about the current state of American farmers and cattle ranchers.

“Beef prices are higher. I got that. How much more are we actually paying?” Varney began.

“Yeah, you’re really going to be treating yourself at the grocery stores, too. Take a look at this for ground beef. Prices are up about 14% year over year, or I should say 13%. I believe ground, 14%; steaks, 17%. The reason why is that cattle inventory in the U.S. is at its lowest numbers in 70 years. I have Mike Martz here with me, who’s invited us to his farm here in Maple Park, Illinois, with 3,000 cattle, right? Talk to me a little bit about how we got to this point,” Saberi then asked her guest.

“The real issue here is the drought that happened a number of years ago. And Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, the Southeast lost all their grass, all their forage. And when that happens, you’ve got to liquidate cows, and that’s what we’ve done. And we’ve gone—we’ve got the lowest cow inventory since 1951. So that’s the cause of this,” Martz replied.

“Obviously, there are other factors that people in your community are still worried about. The president has said he’d like to potentially give the revenue from tariffs to people in your position. Why is that still important right now? What are you dealing with?” Saberi followed up.
“It’s important because some of the price drop we’ve seen on the grain side came from the tariffs, and we’re seeing input costs higher because it came from the tariffs. And here at Larson Farms, we’ve got our cattle operation, we got our crop operation. Cattle are making money; the crops are going to lose money. So hopefully we can average that together, but we need some support,” Martz replied.

“Mike, thank you so much. And Stu, I’ll leave you with this. One reason why some of these farmers think that the demand has also increased is because of drugs like Ozempic and people just generally wanting to eat more meat as part of their diets. I’ll send it back to you,” Saberi said to Varney.

Watch the clip above via Fox Business.