The barn was hot, as only a barn can be when the first day of September remembers it’s still summer and sends temperatures into the 90s.
The people inside the barn were hot, too, both in terms of temperature and also temperament. The governor said she was “outraged.” One farmer called the situation an “abomination.” Another spoke of a “huge problem.”
The people gathered around tables in Tom and Tara Williamson’s barn all had a beef about beef, specifically President Donald Trump’s announced plan to lower beef prices by importing foreign beef and subsidizing it so the product can be sold 25% below market rate.
We don’t know yet how consumers will feel about this, but it’s clear that beef farmers aren’t thrilled. Nationally, we’ve seen Republican legislators from farm states who usually aren’t inclined to criticize the president voice their disapproval. On Tuesday, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, came to Botetourt County to meet with a barn full of farmers and others connected with the beef cattle industry in Virginia to denounce Trump’s plan and hear from farmers what they think should be done. Farmers are generally a conservative lot, but the farmers who spoke up certainly weren’t pleased. “We’ve not been too happy the last 10 days,” said Gene Copenhaver, a Washington County farmer who serves as president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Multiple times, Spanberger said she was “outraged” by Trump’s decision. When she gathered her cabinet members recently for a routine meeting, “I don’t think they were expecting to see such rage from me,” the governor said. “The idea that the president would just unilaterally say, you know how I’ll fix this [high prices] — I’ll flood the market with beef from some other country, won’t say where it’s from or what standards it was produced under. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what that will do to the market, but we’re going to subsidize it up to 25%. It’s an outrage. If this were any other industry, it would be called anti-capitalist, undermining American industry.” (Spanberger’s secretary of agriculture and forestry, Katie Frazier, quipped that “rage is an understatement” to describe the governor’s mood.)
Spanberger said the president’s actions might temporarily lower beef prices but would hurt the American beef industry long-term by discouraging investment and inadvertently encouraging farmers to leave the business. “It’s outrageously offensive,” she said. An analogy might be if an administration decided the solution to high auto prices was to import lots of foreign cars, and subsidize them, which might put domestic automakers out of business. The more conventional economic approach would be to encourage more domestic manufacturing; that’s a slower process but would do more to protect American business and workers in the long run.
Little-known fact: When Spanberger was in Congress, she was the only Virginia member on the House Agriculture Committee. During the campaign last year, she talked about farming more than most Democratic candidates do — not that it did her much good in farming communities that typically vote Republican. In Botetourt County, where Spanberger held her event Tuesday, she couldn’t even scrape together 30% of the vote, coming in at 29.54%. However, as governor, Spanberger said it’s her job to look out for Virginia’s biggest private industry — the agriculture industry. She made a point of including her secretary of agriculture and forestry on a recent trade mission to Europe and now has taken up the case of beef cattle farmers. Last week, the governor sent a stern letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to protest the administration’s beef imports. On Tuesday, she assembled a barn full of farmers to hear their ideas on how to promote the Virginia beef cattle industry. Her staff pointed out that the governor wore a Texas-sized Cattlemen’s Association belt buckle for the occasion.
Spanberger’s pushback on beef imports fits into a bigger context of her ongoing criticism of the Trump administration over tariffs that she says are hurting Virginia’s economy. She reminded the farmers Tuesday that Canada is Virginia’s largest export market. She wasn’t the only one. Kent Baucus, executive director of government affairs for the National Cattleman’s Association, was at the table and he also made the case that “Canada is a tremendous market for us. For now, beef and cattle aren’t in the crosshairs — yet.” The concern is that tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs between the two nations could change that.
“This is an abomination,” said Bill Tucker of Amherst County, whose wife is a Republican member of that county’s board of supervisors. “This is an attack on free enterprise.” Just to make sure I heard him correctly, I talked to him after the meeting and he repeated that it’s an “abomination” that government would think it would know better than the marketplace. That used to be a standard Republican viewpoint.
Adam Wilson, who has about 1,000 cattle on his Washington County farm, complained that “flooding the market with cheap hamburger” won’t help American farmers. What would help? “Cheaper diesel fuel would make a difference,” he told the governor. He estimated he spends $5,000 a week on fuel.
The basic problem with beef prices now is that the American cattle herd is the smallest it’s been since 1951 — but we’re trying to feed a population that’s more than doubled in size. Supply is low, demand is high — so prices are, too. The solutions to that are long-term ones; much of the conversation Tuesday was dominated by how to carry out some of those solutions.
Development pressures have long been pushing farmers out of business. One farmer (whose name I didn’t catch) told the group that “you say grandpa wanted you to have that farm; he meant he wanted you to put on boots and go work. He didn’t mean turn it into 72 houses and go retire at the beach.” This is where public policy (and the free market) get complicated because we also need more housing. It’s hard for farmers to stay in business, and even harder for new ones to get into the business. The Williamsons, who hosted the event, farm 450 acres but only own three of them. The rest is leased, and ultimately subject to the owners deciding that leasing their land for farming is a better option than developing it.
Much of the conversation dealt with the problem of finding beef processors. Four companies control about 80% to 85% of the meat processing in the country — the word “monopoly” came up. Earlier this summer, one of those companies — JBS USA — announced it’s closing several plants, including one in Pennsylvania that many Virginia farmers use. They cited the declining size of the American beef herd, but the farmers Tuesday complained that losing a processing plant makes it harder to get their product to market. “You’ve got just a handful of processors processing these cattle,” said Wilson, the Washington County farmer.
Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, represents an urban district but sponsored legislation in 2021 and 2022 to promote the development of small processing plants in Virginia. Rasoul was present Tuesday and one farmer gave him a shout-out for his work. However, there was also a consensus that Virginia needs larger processors than the small-scale ones that Rasoul’s legislation has helped bring into being.
Spanberger said her administration has been looking into whether the state could help create a beef cattle cooperative for processing the way the Virginia Poultry Growers Cooperative works. (It was formed in 2004 after the closure of a major turkey processing facility in Rockingham County.) “We’ve been having conversations on this question,” the governor said. “How can the state be a partner in helping to stand up local processors? We’re looking at how that might work. … What I haven’t said is ‘yes, we’re going to do it,’ but the constraints that are holding us back are funding, structure, workforce.” There seemed agreement at the roundtable discussion that this would be a good thing.
I asked House Minority Whip Michael Webert, R-Fauquier County, about this because he’s a beef cattle farmer. He wasn’t present but added a fourth consideration: “Ensuring that you have consistency in product.” He was generally supportive of helping expand processing capacity. “We just opened the border to live cattle imports,” he said by text message. “Those cattle will be sent to the processors in three to six months, increasing the supply of cattle in the U.S. but the number of processors has shrunk. … We need to work with the federal government to streamline the regulations to be able to get processors to expand the capital necessary for them to. For instance, my processor in Fauquier has been looking to expand but it’s $1.5 million or more.”
Another tidbit of news from the governor’s meeting: She said the administration is working on arranging for emergency shipments of hay so that farmers can feed their cattle during the drought. She said she’d have more details on that soon. She said the goal is to get hay to farmers before winter feeding begins — and other states start clamoring for more hay, as well. The reason the Williamsons’ barn was available Tuesday is that they’ve already had to start feeding hay to their cattle. Normally the space where the governor’s roundtable was held would have been full of hay.
I’ll have more to say about the governor’s visit to Botetourt in Friday’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:
