Cattle Costs: The Rational and the Curious Case of Funding From Mr. Gates

EDITORIAL, STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS

Cattle Prices: The Rational and the Curious Case of Funding From Mr. Gates

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Written by Matt Morgan, Editor at The Daily Bell:

 

Ground beef just hit a record of about $6.90 a pound, up 78 percent since the start of 2020.

The official explanation arrives in three parts:

1. Drought,
2. A shrinking herd,
3. And now a flesh-eating fly crawling north out of Mexico.

Every part of that explanation is true. None of it is the cause.

The cause is the thing the people delivering the explanation would prefer you not look at, which is money. And the reason a sizeable chunk of the country has decided that Bill Gates is breeding ticks to herd them onto lab-grown protein is not that the country has lost its mind. It is that the institutions in charge of the dollar and the food supply have spent fifteen years proving they will say whatever is convenient. When trustworthy explanations are unavailable, people build their own. Let me separate the rational from the curious.

 

 

 

 

 

The Rational Factors from the Rational Rancher

Watch:

There is a boring explanation for that chart, and boring explanations are usually the correct ones.

Start with the dollar. Between early 2020 and 2022 the M2 money supply grew by roughly 40 percent, from about $15.4 trillion to nearly $21.7 trillion, the fastest peacetime monetary expansion in American history.

The Federal Reserve will never put on a slide:

A price is a ratio between a good and a unit of money, so when you manufacture trillions of new units, the ratio moves. So, Beef did not become more valuable. The dollar became smaller. Calling the result “inflation,” as if it were weather with no author is the whole trick… Yet, someone printed the money on their computer.

On top of that monetary cause sits a real one, and this is where the rancher earns his keep. The American cattle herd stands at 86.2 million head, the lowest level since 1951. Years of drought burned up pasture and pushed ranchers to sell breeding stock they would rather have kept. Feed, fuel, land, and borrowing costs all climbed at once. The number of cattle operations fell from about 882,000 in 2017 to 732,000 five years later, and the median American farmer is now 58 years old. You cannot conjure a cow. The lag between deciding to rebuild a herd and selling its offspring runs years, which is why the USDA expects tight supply and high prices to stick around.

The state debased the money, and then weather and arithmetic thinned the herd. A family that goes through three pounds of ground beef a week is now paying on the order of $470 more a year for the same meat than it did six years ago, and most of that increase bought them nothing at all.

 

A Few Curious Situations

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Now the parts that make people reach for the word “engineered.”

On June 3 the USDA confirmed New World screwworm in a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, the first case in American livestock since 1966. The larvae of this fly burrow into living tissue and, left untreated, kill. It is a real threat to a herd that is already the smallest in three generations. What is curious is not the fly. It is the choreography. The day before the confirmation, the Secretary of Agriculture denied the pest had been found within a mile of the border; a day later it was in Texas, and the Texas Agriculture Commissioner was accusing Washington of moving too slowly. The agency now assuring you the food supply is safe is the same one that could not say where the fly was twenty-four hours earlier.

Then there is Mr. Gates, and here I am going to do the thing the viral videos refuse to do… stick to what can be sourced.

What is verifiable is striking enough. Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, holding somewhere between 242,000 and 275,000 acres. He has put money into Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and the cultured-meat firm now called Upside Foods. And in 2021 he told MIT Technology Review that all rich countries should move to “100% synthetic beef,” adding that regulation could be used to shift consumer demand away from the real thing entirely. A man who owns the dirt, funds the replacement product, and openly favors using the state to force the switch is not a conspiracy theory. Gates is describing his own plan.

What is not verifiable is the rest of it. The claim that someone engineered and released ticks to give Americans a red-meat allergy does not survive contact with the evidence. Alpha-gal syndrome is real and rising, with the CDC estimating that as many as 450,000 people may be affected and the lone star tick spreading north as its range shifts. But the tick is native, and the CDC’s own surveillance shows suspected cases climbing since at least 2010, well before the programs the videos point to.

The thing is, Gates doesn’t need to breed ticks. Just notice this:

The man telling you to give up beef stands to profit when you do, and is comfortable using regulation to make sure of it.

 

The Real Disease

Here is what ties the rational and the curious together. In every case the party with the most power and the worst record is asking for your trust on the strength of its authority alone.

The disease is a currency that can be debased without a vote and a state that has nothing at stake. Fix the money so that prices tell the truth, strip the agencies of the immunity that lets them mislead you, and the tick stories die on their own.