President Trump’s recent decision to quadruple Argentine beef imports is concerning analysts and ag stakeholders alike. According to a Feb. 6 executive order, Argentina can now export an additional 80,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings into the U.S. this year.
Lean beef trimmings are used to produce ground beef.
This is the president’s latest attempt to lower consumer beef prices, which continue to rise. According to federal data, the price of ground beef increased 17.9% in December. This followed a 17.3% increase the previous month.
“As President of the United States, I have a responsibility to ensure that hard-working Americans can afford to feed themselves and their families,” Trump said in his Feb. 6 proclamation.
The news comes on the heels of a Feb. 5 reciprocal trade and investment agreement between the U.S. and Argentina. Among other provisions, that framework deal grants U.S. producers greater access to the Argentine market in return for some U.S. tariff concessions.
“While we fundamentally disagree with the premise that increased imports can lower beef prices, NCBA is encouraged to see the Trump administration take necessary steps to address longstanding market-access challenges for U.S. beef in Argentina,” Kent Bacus, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association executive director of international trade and market access, said in a prepared statement. “However, given Argentina’s issues with foreign animal diseases, NCBA remains concerned that expanding imports from Argentina without increased inspection protocols and up-to-date audits could place American consumers and our cattle herd at unnecessary risk.”
Will consumer prices come down?
Trump appears to be betting that increasing supply will help consumers. However, even some Republicans aren’t buying it. Nebraska Republican Senator Deb Fischer wasted little time expressing her disappointment with the president’s decision.
"Nebraska produces the world's best beef,” she said in a Feb. 6 public statement. “Instead of imports that sideline American ranchers, we should be focused on solutions that cut red tape, lower production costs, and support growing our cattle herd.”
The data seems to support Fischer’s point.
Under existing trade agreements, Argentina is allowed to export up to 20,000 metric tons of beef into the U.S. at a tariff rate of 4.4 cents per kilogram. Trump’s executive order increases that amount by an additional 20,000 metric tons per quarter.
According to a Feb. 10 American Farm Bureau Federation analysis, the now 100,000 metric tons of imported Argentine beef would account for only around 1% of total U.S. beef consumption.
As Michigan State professor David Ortega puts it, 80,000 metric tons may sound like a lot. However, Americans consume more than 25 billion pounds of beef a year. Adding the metric equivalent of 176 million pounds is “basically a rounding error.”
How will executive order impact farmers?
According to the farm bureau analysis, U.S. cattle inventory is unlikely to expand until at least 2028. That’s not soon enough for Trump, who vowed to quickly bring down inflation when he returned to office. According to multiple polls conducted since Jan. 1, around 60% of the country now disapproves of how the president has handled inflation and the economy.
With midterm elections looming, Trump seems keen to prove that his policies will eventually lower food prices. While prices for some items, notably eggs, have declined in the past years, overall food inflation rose by 2.9% in 2025. That’s more than a half a percentage point higher than the 2.3% increase during President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
During Feb. 4 remarks at CattleCon 2026, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said “nobody in the administration” wants to be importing beef. Still, he said, Trump promised to drive down grocery prices too, so there has to be a “balance” between those priorities.
“We're doing everything we can to encourage people to increase the size of the herds in this country. But…you can't do that overnight,” Kennedy said. “It takes 18 months or more before we start seeing that at the grocery store."
In the meantime, the concern for cattle producers is how much additional imported supply will impact their bottom line. As Buck Wehrbein, NCBA past president, pointed out during Kennedy’s remarks, overall beef production in the U.S. is only down around 2% despite the shrinking herd size.
Ag industry analysis firm Terrain recently completed a survey of cattle customers on behalf of Farm Credit. It attempted to quantify what drove changes in the beef cow herd during 2025. The survey also tried to gauge how producers are approaching decisions this year and next.
“As we went through the government shutdown and then the president declaring that beef prices were too high; and he was going to fix it with tariffs and maybe allowing more imports, it threw a lot of uncertainty into the system,” Dave Weaber, Terrain senior animal protein analyst, told Farm Progress at CattleCon. “We wanted to gauge what that meant for producers, so we asked a series of questions of what they did in 2025.”
The results were mixed. About half of the responders said they planned to expand operations. Notably, around 60% of producers who expanded in 2025 did so with cattle already included in the nationwide count.
While the survey cited prices as an important factor, grazing conditions were producers’ biggest concern. Approximately one-third of the 1,050 survey respondents listed it as their top issue. Drought forecast and the impending El Niño, as well as land availability, were also of greater concern to respondents than price volatility.
Of course, those responses came before the president’s latest announcement. Ortega cautions policies like Trump’s executive order can backfire. According to him, high cattle prices are the signal ranchers need to rebuild herds. Undercutting that signal with cheaper imports discourages herd expansion-- the very thing required to fix a long‑term supply crunch. Ortega warns Trump’s policy risks prolonging the underlying problem.
“This executive order looks less like economic strategy and more like political theater,” he says. “It creates the illusion of action on food inflation while sidestepping the hard work: addressing production costs, drought vulnerability, or even the demand dynamics driving the market. The reality is that high beef prices are in store for the foreseeable future.”
Raney Rapp contributed to this report.