A More Perfect Plate #12 - Beef: It's On Your Plate

At Lake Geneva Country Meats, some people think that we're expensive.

Fact is, we sell our ground beef for less per pound than the comparable product at Walmart (as of August 23rd, 2026 when I write this) at $6.99 per pound.

However, when you get to our tenderloin filets, you will not find such a low price. Our tenderloin filet costs $44.99 per pound. That is expensive, and there is no way around it.

We're not looking to rip you off with that price; the filet is expensive because it's rare.

That filet is about half a percent of the sellable weight of the animal it came from. About two percent of the animal's value. Four times as much value as weight, which makes it almost like gold!

Processing beef is a numbers game. A game of subtraction, not of addition. A finished steer will walk into Lake Geneva Country Meats weighing roughly 1,450 pounds. Once the head, hide, hooves, blood and organs come off, you have about 900 pounds of carcass. This number is called the dressed weight. Cut that into steaks and roasts and ground beef, and a 1,450-pound live animal becomes about 540 pounds of net take-home weight.

And of that 540 pounds, just twelve pounds is tenderloin. Twelve, out of 1,450.

I've been around meat my whole life and this math is something I've explained to customers, students, and journalists thousands of times. Every time I share it with someone new, I'm met with a bit of doubt. It seems impossible that there is such loss, and that the loss from live weight to edible weight is what causes beef to cost so much.

It's not just the loss. There are lots of other factors, such as the cost of feeding and raising the animal, transport costs, and the cost of paying a skilled butcher to cut the animal. But the loss is a percentage that amplifies all of those other factors.

This Dispatch comes at a time when there is more discussion than ever about beef prices and what can be done to make beef "affordable" for the "average" American.

In this Dispatch, I'm going to share how beef comes to your table. We'll take a quick journey through history to understand what we went through to get to the system we have in place today, then we'll describe today's system, and break down the numbers that put a steak on your table.

At the end, I hope you'll understand where your money is going, and appreciate the work and skill that goes into that steak, roast, or pound of ground beef.

Where did American cattle even come from?

Not from here. Cattle aren't native to North America, and they showed up twice.

The English brought milk cows to the East Coast, and what people wanted was the milk. Fresh milk, butter, cheese you could keep. A cow was a machine that turned grass into dairy every single day, and harvesting a cow meant switching off the machine that made the dairy.

The boy cows, well, they were the disappointment. They pulled the plow (an ox is just a steer with a job), and they got eaten at the end of a working life, which is to say they were tough. Beef was what happened when a useful animal stopped being useful.

The second place cows came from was the South, when the Spanish brought cattle north out of Mexico, and those did something different. They got loose. They thrived on open range and kept breeding with nobody keeping books on them.

Then the Civil War pulled most of the men out of Texas for four years, and the herd that had been kept in check by people eating it was suddenly not being kept in check by anything. By 1866 there were an estimated five million half-wild longhorns down there. A steer was worth about four dollars a head in Texas and forty in the North and East.

For scale, butter on an ordinary American farm ran around thirty cents a pound in that era. A longhorn at 900 to 1,000 pounds and four dollars a head works out to something like two and a half cents a pound on the hoof. Beef wasn't just cheap in Texas. It was nearly free, and it was worth ten times more eight hundred miles away.

That math was a logistics problem waiting to be solved.

Who thought walking cattle a thousand miles was a good idea?

A cattle buyer from Illinois named Joseph McCoy.

In 1867 he talked the railroad into a shipping point at Abilene, Kansas, which at the time was some log huts, some dugouts, and nothing else. He built cattle pens. He built a hotel to keep cattlemen in. Then he sent men south into Texas to find herds and tell them to come north. He built the supply and the demand at the same time, in a town that barely existed.

On August 15, before the pens were even finished, 7,000 longhorns showed up. By the end of that first season, 35,000. Between 1866 and 1884, an estimated 5.2 million head came north out of Texas, driven by cowboys, across an open range.

Just like we say Amazon isn't a website, it's a logistics company, the cowboys weren't a culture, they were a logistics solution. The only way to move those cheap cows was by walking them, so those young men got hired to be the delivery drivers of their day, walking cattle to railheads where they could be shipped north. Some of the herd would die, and it took time, but for those prices, it made sense.

So why did the drives only last twenty years?

With the impact cowboys have made in American culture, it seems like this time in history must have lasted for many years.

Nope. The most mythologized job in American history ran for only about twenty years. By 1884, being a cowboy on a cattle drive was an essentially obsolete job.

People in 1875 understood that cattle drives were inefficient and were looking for ways to move cows more efficiently. But a Chicago packer named Gustavus Swift asked why anyone was moving cattle at all. Roughly sixty percent of a live animal is stuff you cannot sell. Moving weight costs fuel, and fuel costs money; plus, animals worn down by a thousand-mile walk died along the way and drove up the cost of every one that made it.

So why not harvest the animal near where it grew up and ship only the part people eat?

It's a great idea, but the problem then became: how do you keep that meat cold so it doesn't spoil?

In 1878, Swift hired an engineer named Andrew Chase. Mr. Chase designed a refrigerated rail car that put ice in a compartment at the top of the car to chill the air as it circulated, and packed the meat low so the load stayed chilled and the car didn't tip on the curves.

Swift took the design to the major railroads, asking them to bring beef carcasses to him in his refrigerated railcar design, and every one of them turned him down because they had enormous money sunk into stock cars and animal pens, and a refrigerated car made it all worthless.

So Swift financed the first production run himself and contracted with the Grand Trunk Railway, a road that wasn't making much hauling live cattle and had nothing to protect. The first cars were delivered in 1880; within a year, the line had nearly 200 of them, and Swift was shipping about 3,000 carcasses a week to Boston for processing.

Armour and the other packing companies followed this plan within a few years because it was a much better way of doing things. Barbed wire went up and closed off the open ranges. The railroads pushed south into Texas for more efficient shipping. The trail drive was done.

What happened in the eighty years nobody talks about?

There's a gap in how the American beef packing story usually gets told. We jump from cowboys leaving the plains straight to the modern grocery store, as if nothing happened in between. Eighty years happened in between, and major developments deserve attention.

Once you could ship chilled meat anywhere, whoever owned the cars and the cold owned the business. Five companies took the whole thing: Swift, Armour, Cudahy, Morris and Wilson. They were vertically integrated in a way that's hard to picture now. They owned the railheads, the refrigerated cars, the warehouses, the wholesalers. If you build model railroads you've seen the Armour reefers, wood-slatted cars packed with hay and ice. Those companies were logistics operations that happened to sell meat.

The Federal Trade Commission found the Big Five controlled about seventy percent of the commercial slaughter of all species, and the report called it a positive conspiracy to control the price of meat.

In February 1920, facing an antitrust suit, the Big Five signed a consent decree that drove them out of stockyards, railcar lines, warehouses, and wholesale and retail meat. Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act the next year. This same instinct shows up everywhere in that era. It's why liquor still runs on a three-tier system where a producer can't also be the distributor and the retailer. America decided in the twenties that owning the whole chain was the problem.

This intervention against consolidation worked. The decree held into the 1970s, and together with tough merger enforcement, it meant the big packers couldn't buy up new entrants or squeeze them out. From roughly 1920 to 1960 you had butcher shops, you had grocery stores, you had big players and small players, and no monopoly. Beef prices were reasonable-ish, and you had choices about where to shop. Government intervention worked, for fifty years.

During all of it, we shipped sides of beef, not pieces of beef. Whole carcasses moved, and somebody at the other end broke them down. That was the job.

Meanwhile, highways and refrigerated trucks were quietly removing the reason to be in Chicago at all, and starting in the 1950s, packers began moving out to sit next to their suppliers. The flexibility the highway system brought America made giving up the rail system's efficiency a worthwhile decision.

So the real story of 1887 to 1961 is that America broke up a meat monopoly, held it broken for two generations, and the company that grew up in that space is the one that built the most concentrated beef industry in our history.

What did two guys in Denison, Iowa figure out?

In 1961, a pork plant owner named A.D. Anderson and a cattle buyer named Currier Holman opened a beef plant in Denison, Iowa on a $300,000 Small Business Administration loan.

They believed meatpacking was antiquated and that what it needed was a meat factory. They put it in Denison to be near the corn and the cattle both, with the goal of processing 800 head per day. And their real question was: why does every town in America need a skilled meatpacker, when you could have all of them in one building?

In 1967, Iowa Beef Packers introduced boxed beef. The plant breaks the carcass down into primals, vacuum-seals them, and ships them in portions instead of hanging them as a side, which meant they stopped paying freight on fat, bone, and trim. Advances in plastics made the vacuum seal possible, and without it, none of it travels.

And it is enormously consumer-friendly, which I think people miss when they get mad about it. Under the old system, a butcher shop bought a beef and got two tenderloins, because an animal has two tenderloins. If somebody came in on December 23rd wanting a tenderloin and both were gone, you were out. Nothing to be done. Would you like a nice round roast? No, they would not. Boxed beef means you can order six briskets in a box instead of buying three whole animals to get those two briskets, plus everything else you get with those briskets!

By 1973 the stockyards and packing houses that had run Chicago and Omaha twenty years earlier were essentially gone, or transformed into the boxed meat factories that are now where we get the majority of our meat supply. Boxed beef didn't win just for beef. It won for chicken, lamb, and pork as well.

Boxed beef made American beef cheaper than it had ever been, but the cost was getting rid of the butcher shop in every town and eliminating the need for a skilled butcher at every grocery store. It also created such efficiencies of scale that consolidation was sure to come again.

How does beef actually get to you today?

Two ways.

The first is the one behind almost everything you eat. A cow-calf operation, which is generally a small family operation, breeds a cow (usually by artificial insemination, which is why cattle genetics have improved so much). She has one calf. The cow and calf stay on the family's pasture for around six to eight months. If the calf is a bull calf, it's going to beef. If it's a heifer, the family decides whether to keep her to grow the herd or send her to beef, and they make that decision on an open commodity exchange where you can look up what each option is worth.

Male calves wean off grass around 450 to 700 pounds and go to a feedlot, where they finish on forage and grain to somewhere between 1,300 and 1,600 pounds. At twenty to twenty-two months, the feedlot sells it to a packer. It gets slaughtered, cut into boxed beef, and enters the stream of commerce. The beef in our retail case at Lake Geneva Country Meats comes in that way, boxed, from a packer in Omaha that runs about 3,000 head a day.

The second way is a rancher that does it all. They cow-calf, and maybe buy a few calves as well to supplement their herd. They feed them all the way out themselves, and bring them to a local slaughterhouse like Lake Geneva Country Meats when the animal is at the proper weight. We process about twenty head a week that way.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, and here at Lake Geneva Country Meats, we take part in both streams.

So why are there only four companies?

Today, four companies, JBS, Cargill, Tyson and National Beef, are usually described as handling about eighty-five percent of American beef processing, up from twenty-five percent in 1971 and seventy-one percent by 1992. The figure is contested, with the low end estimate being 73%. Either number is a lot, and it's higher than the number that forced federal intervention in the 1920s.

Now I'm going to say something you may not expect from a small butcher shop:

I think the big plants are mostly necessary.

Slaughtering beef is brutally hard, expensive, heavily regulated work, and it should be. Food safety is real. Workplace safety is real. Wastewater rules are real. None of it should go away. But almost all of that cost is fixed. Writing and validating a food safety plan costs roughly the same whether you're running 3,000 head a day or twenty a week. Spread across 3,000 head, it's a rounding error. Spread across twenty, and that cost is significant. At a big plant a full-time compliance person is a line item. At Lake Geneva Country Meats, that person is me, at night, after everything else gets done.

That isn't a theory or me complaining. Research on the federal HACCP rollout found that even controlling for scale, very small plants carried higher compliance costs, and small and very small plants were more likely to exit the business during the transition.

Even with a billion dollars in federal grants available, small meatpacking plants have struggled to survive. I'll go further: there is federal grant money coming to my shop (that I did not ask for but am happy to take if everyone else is also getting it) from a program designed to help small processors compete with the Big Four, and I think the program is not going to work. We aren't sure what the end number will be, but rough math estimates are somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.

$100,000 cannot buy the machine that packages our ground beef. For that, we need $160,000. I hate to say $100,000 is nothing, because it's not, but to scale meat processing, it's a drop in the bucket.

I don't like monopolies. I also don't think a thousand shops my size can feed 340 million people.

You can have cheap beef, or you can have an industry of boutique processors. I have never seen a credible version where you get both. Japan faced the same choice with less land and less water, and they rely on imported beef from places like Australia for cheap supply, while domestic beef is a super-premium product served in small portions.

There's no perfect answer, but pretending that simply breaking up the meat packing monopoly will result in lower prices is disingenuous, and is not an argument I will make.

Now the twelve pounds

Let's do the math on one animal, and I'll use real numbers from real animals we buy.

A steer costs about $3,770. That's 1,450 pounds at roughly $2.60 a pound live weight. Take off the head, the hide, the hooves, the blood, the organs, and everything in the stomach, and you have the approximate 900-pound dressed weight we mentioned at the start of this Dispatch. Cut that into steaks, roasts, and ground beef, for your approximate 540-pound take-home weight.

Twelve pounds of that is tenderloin.

Here's the first thing that math tells you. Divide $3,770 by 540 pounds, and every single pound of that animal costs about $6.98 in raw material. Not the steaks. Every pound. The tenderloin, the chuck, the shank, the ground beef, all of it, $6.98 before anybody kills it, cuts it, wraps it, trucks it or makes a nickel on it.

Right now, the average retail price of ground beef in this country is $7.06 a pound.

America's most popular cut of beef is selling for about eight cents a pound over what the live animal cost.

Now, if everything were priced evenly, those twelve pounds of tenderloin would cost you $83.78, or $6.98 a pound. But nothing is priced evenly, and it shouldn't be, because you'll get about 240 pounds of ground beef off the same animal and only twelve pounds of tenderloin. Twenty times as much ground as tenderloin.

Run that out. If ground beef is $7 a pound and tenderloin is one-twentieth as available, tenderloin ought to be $140 a pound. But no one would pay that, so you need to figure out a way to assign value to all the other steaks and cuts in an animal to make sure you cover the meat cost, the labor cost, the packaging cost, and that ever-increasing overhead cost.

It's a tough exercise that's based on market, consumer preferences, math, and a not insignificant amount of intuition. Once our process is done, we end up charging $44.99 per pound for your tenderloin filet.

Is that fair? It's up to you to decide, but we feel that number represents the value we bring to the plate with that filet, and our customers keep buying tenderloins because they're so darn good.

Why is it less elsewhere? There are a couple of reasons:

1. Some places sell cow tenderloins rather than steer, and cow tenderloins are big and fatty and not very good, so they're less money.
2. Some places trim less, which means you're paying steak prices for fat and silverskin you're going to cut off and throw away.
3. Some places are moving old frozen stock.
4. And some places use it as a loss leader to get you in the door.

We have not put beef on sale in three months. Not because I don't want to. When we put steaks on sale, people show up, and I like it when they do. There's just no money in it to give away right now.

So who's getting rich?

Nobody. I mean that literally.

Ranchers are getting the best prices in the history of American cattle. Feeder steers hit $388.06 per hundredweight at Oklahoma City in early May, an all-time high. That's $3.88 a pound for a live animal. And they are paying the most they have ever paid for calves, for feed, for fuel, for fertilizer, for water rights, for electricity. Record revenue is not record profit.

Packers, the ones everybody assumes are cleaning up, were losing close to $200 a head at the end of April. These are public companies filing real accounting, not marketing. They're making money on chicken and pork. On beef they're bleeding, and beef plants have been closing.

You, the consumer, are paying about seven dollars a pound for ground beef, up 13 percent in a year and roughly 72 percent higher than January 2020.

Why all of it at once?

The cattle herd fell to 86.2 million head as of January 2026, a record low, with the beef cow inventory down 8.6 percent since 2020. About three quarters of the beef cow herd is in drought. COVID scrambled demand so badly we changed our ground beef price five times in five days. Feed, fuel, and fertilizer are all expensive. Trade fights haven't helped. And then screwworm shut down live cattle imports from Mexico.

Underneath all of it is biology you cannot argue with. A cow carries one calf for nine months, and the animal isn't ready for twenty-two more. One cow, one calf. Not a sow with a dozen piglets. Not a hen laying every day. A heifer held back for breeding today does not put beef in a case for years, which is why nobody expects real relief before 2028.

You can print money. You cannot print a cow.

And then Friday happened

I finished this Dispatch, recorded the podcast with Bridget on Wednesday, and on Friday morning the ground shifted.

President Trump announced that for the next 90 days the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef product in with no out-of-quota tariff, saying there is a commitment that the beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices. A White House official said foreign exporters would provide that discount in exchange for tariff relief, but wouldn't say which exporters. The administration hasn't said which countries will supply it or how a discount gets enforced at a cash register, and the executive order won't be signed for about two weeks. It's the third such move: Argentine beef was floated in October, and an order quadrupling those imports was signed in February.

Cattle futures fell on the news.

I'm not going to pretend I'm neutral. I oppose this move for reasons that have nothing to do with the political party in charge.

A tariff waiver with no named counterparty, no enforcement mechanism, and a ninety-day clock does nothing about a herd that takes until 2028 to rebuild. It aims at the calendar. And on day ninety-one, the waiver disappears and prices jump, and I would bet a tenderloin that the jump gets blamed on somebody other than the people who wrote the policy.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said this tariff waiver wouldn't address the administration's own stated goal of growing the herd, and the US Cattlemen's Association put it more directly: you don't put America first by putting American cattle producers last. Several Republican senators objected too.

I understand American consumers want cheap ground beef. I'm not unsympathetic to how it is getting tougher to put an affordable meal on the table.

I am also sympathetic to the American rancher who is working hard and dealing with similar cost increases. Consumers can swap ground beef for ground pork once a week to save money.

We don't want to replace our ranchers by making it unprofitable for them to operate in America by flooding the market with cheap foreign imports.

Back to the plate

So now you know the stakes in getting a steak to your plate. (Did you really think this one would end without a Dad joke?)

Out of 1,450 pounds walking around a pasture, about 540 pounds come home with you. Twelve of those are tenderloin. Every single pound costs about seven dollars before anyone killed it, cut it, wrapped it, or moved it.

For years, we could tell customers that if they didn't feel that tenderloin filet was in their budget (and really, it should be a special-occasion cut for almost everyone!), there were plenty of other, less expensive cuts they could enjoy.

Today, there are no cheap cuts. Brisket, which was a solid "send it to grind" cut in my grandfather's day, costs up to $15 per pound depending on how it's trimmed. Chuck roasts are more expensive than ground beef. Beef tongues are so in demand they can reach double digits in pricing. Heck, even beef shanks are around $4 per pound!

Americans have gotten used to one big steak in the middle of the table. And maybe that's what we need to change when we think about the cost of beef.

A sixteen-ounce ribeye is four servings, not one. At twenty-eight dollars a pound, that's seven dollars a person. That feels reasonable for the steak most people think is the juiciest, most flavorful cut on an animal that costs thousands of dollars and takes years to produce.

So to the person who thinks Lake Geneva Country Meats is expensive: on steak, you're right. Our ground beef beats Walmart, but our ribeye doesn't, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What you're paying for is a cut that's been trimmed the way I'd trim it for my own family, off an animal I can tell you something about, by somebody who spent years learning to do it. That costs money, and we charge what we feel fairly reflects it.

Turning a cow on pasture into a steak on your table takes hard work and intense resource usage. We've spent 160 years relentlessly pursuing efficiency to drop prices, and now we've hit the limits of that process. With a slew of issues hitting American ranchers and packers at the same time, prices are returning to historical and global norms.

Somebody may find the next refrigerated railcar or the next boxed beef. Those were game-changing, price-dropping innovations, and I'd be lying if I said I could see the next one coming. For now, this price level is what we can expect for at least a few years.

Unlike our tenderloin filet, that's tough to swallow. But that's just the math.

Cheers!

Nick

Recommended Books:

In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America by Maureen Ogle

Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America by Joshua Specht

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