You can’t legislate the cattle cycle

There’s a new Family Grocer and Farmer Relief Bill getting tee’d up that promises a lot: break up dominant meatpackers, rein in foreign-controlled giants, stop unfair pricing, and deliver lower prices and better choices at the meat counter.

That’s a clean storyline.

It’s also built on a stack of assumptions that don’t match how the beef system actually operates. When policy is written to a storyline instead of an integrated system, the result is predictable: more pain