I will confirm the Friday statement and the ownership of the major processors so the three paragraphs stay accurate.President Donald Trump announced Friday that his administration will seek the legal and regulatory changes necessary to let American farmers and ranchers slaughter and process their own livestock for market—an intervention aimed at loosening the hold of the handful of firms that now dominate U.S. meat packing. The statement, issued after ranchers and rural lawmakers objected to import measures that threatened cattle prices, treats processing not as a privilege dispensed by Washington but as a capacity the people who raise the animals already possess. For decades the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the interstate-commerce rules that grew from it have funneled nearly all commercial beef through a small number of inspected plants. The result is a bottleneck: the man who finished the steer cannot sell the steak unless he first surrenders it to the system that buys cheap and sells dear. Trump’s order to draw the papers is an attempt to reopen that gate.

The four companies that control roughly eighty-five percent of fed-cattle slaughter—JBS USA, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef—operate as a practical oligopoly whether or not they formally conspire. Two of them, JBS and National Beef, answer to Brazilian parents; the other two remain American-headquartered yet sit inside a market so concentrated that ranchers face few genuine buyers. That structure has long been accused of paying too little for live cattle and charging too much for boxed beef, a spread that widens when plants slow, fires strike, or imports are invited in to “discipline” domestic supply. Foreign ownership of a large share of packing capacity only sharpens the grievance: the profits leave the county, while the rancher still must haul animals hundreds of miles to a plant that may or may not want them this week. A policy that lets producers process and sell their own meat does not abolish inspection; it challenges the premise that safety can exist only at industrial scale.

Farmers have slaughtered and dressed their own animals for as long as there have been herds. The postwar administrative state converted that ordinary competence into a regulated specialty, then allowed the remaining specialists to consolidate until four names stood between the pasture and the plate. The change now contemplated—whether by executive action, revised guidance, or statutes such as the long-stalled PRIME Act—would restore a right that existed before the inspector became the indispensable middleman. Details remain to be written, and food-safety advocates will warn that uninspected commerce invites disaster. Yet the deeper question is whether a free people who can raise cattle may also finish them, or whether the modern republic requires that every steak pass through a foreign-tinged cartel first. The administration has chosen the older answer. Monday’s promised USDA announcements will show how far it intends to go.

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