Driving around his farm in a four-wheeler, Scott Birker warned that his cattle were in a bad mood.
"They're a little grumpy with me right now," he said.
When asked why, he said matter-of-factly: "We just got done weaning."
Birker should know his herd well, given that he's been raising beef cattle outside the Eastern Iowa town of Garrison since 2001. His operation has about 150 "mama cows" and sells feeder calves, as well as some cattle for meat. And Birker is also the northeast regional vice president for the Iowa Cattlemen's Association.
All of which is to say that since August, when Trump announced that his administration would raise the quota on beef imported under lower tariffs – temporarily suspending tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef – Birker knows it when he says: that hurt people.
"That surprise, with a very volatile market already, with a tight supply, hurts us really, really fast and really, really hard," Birker said.
It's not that raising beef cattle was easy before that new import policy. Margins are always tight, says Zach Raff, incoming livestock economist at Iowa State University. But there have also been other challenges – for example, drought in much of the western U.S. made hay much more expensive and shrank the nation's beef herd.
"The beef herd size is at an all time low – a 75-year-low," said Raff. "So you couple that with very strong demand. And that's going to make prices what you see at the store right now."
Ground beef currently costs around $6.80 a pound – a fact of which the Trump administration is keenly aware. But the administration's attempts to bring those prices down have backfired politically and possibly economically..
Multiple Trump administration policies have made life tougher for beef producers. Last year, amid the trade war between the two countries, China cut its US beef purchases. In February, Trump signed an executive order to subject some Argentinian beef to fewer tariffs.
And in August, he signed the executive order to suspend tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of beef imports – specifically, lean beef trimmings, with the goal of lowering the price of ground beef. The order added that the imported beef was to be sold at 25% below market prices.
That helped push U.S. cattle prices lower, but the far bigger challenge, according to Raff, was the amount of uncertainty it introduced.
"If I'm a producer, I think, well, look what's happening – perhaps next year they're going to import even more. The year after, there's going to be a different policy," said Raff. "And I'm going to say, 'Well, these prices for my cattle right now are at record highs and projected to be high. So I'm just going to send my heifers to be processed.' I'm not going to decide to replace the beef herd when I know that there's a lot of uncertainty."
This means the beef imports can have an added downside, disincentivizing producers from keeping breeding stock around that could grow the beef herd, which would lower beef prices in the long run.
Big picture
From an economics 101 perspective, the Trump decision to import more beef does make sense as a way of bringing down consumer prices. But the 300,000 metric tons that could be exempted from tariffs is equivalent to around 2% of total US beef consumption.
That made for a lose-lose situation: the policy was enough to rattle beef producers, but not enough to help consumers. Indeed, the average ground beef price per pound in September was only about 13 cents lower than it was in August.
All of this looms over the 2026 midterm elections, especially in farm states such as Iowa. Iowa Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, who's running for the state's open Senate seat, made news when she publicly broke with the Trump administration on its decision to lower tariffs on beef imports.
"We need to focus on affordability, but I think this isn't the way to do that," she said on Fox News. "I think we need to focus on helping our cattlemen grow their herd."
Her opponent, Democratic state legislator Josh Turek, has in turn been stressing that Hinson has supported some Trump policies that have hurt farmers writ large.
"She's been in favor of all this five times in favor of the tariffs," he said in an interview with NPR. "Farmers rely on markets, on free trade, more than any other group."
In the governor's race, similarly, Democratic state auditor Rob Sand has sharply criticized Trump's trade policies, while Republican businessman Zach Lahn has avoided that kind of criticism.
Iowa Republican strategist David Oman says that in either race, the beef policy could be a deciding factor.
"Both of them will be two- or three-, four-point races in my view," he said. "So any one element like this topic that cuts against you hurts."
Indeed, the administration has been playing defense on the beef policy from the beginning. Speaking in Iowa just days after the beef executive order, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins acknowledged that the August order lifting the beef tariff rate quotas, or TRQs, might not be popular.
"I believe everyone will look back on this time and say, okay, didn't love the three month lift of the TRQ, but we're so grateful to a president that is willing to listen, willing to make big, bold decisions, and willing to put it all out there for our American producers," she said at the Iowa Farm Progress Show.
How it plays
Seth Watkins, who has his own cattle herd in southwestern Iowa, outside the town of Clarinda, says that these trade decisions make him upset not only with Trump, but with all of Washington.
"As much as what the president does frustrates me, I think I'm more frustrated with Congress, who should be exercising the checks and balances we learned about in high school civics," he said.
He's a Democrat and going to vote blue in this election, though he says he doesn't blame other farmers who have supported Trump.
"They honestly were told that tariffs were going to make markets better," he said. "They were told that we were going to enter this new golden era. I just filled up my pickup with $6.30 diesel fuel."
This is not just about Iowa. Several states with some of the tightest races this year – Texas, Nebraska, Montana, and Kansas – are also major beef-producing states, meaning lots of people weighing these particular trade policies as they vote.
Back on his farm, Birker knows how he'll vote, too: "I'll vote Republican."
Birker stresses that this is purely a personal decision, and that the Iowa Cattlemen are a non partisan group. But for his part, he generally votes Republican, and getting to talk personally to Hinson also reinforced his choice.
As for Trump, Birker approves of how he's doing as president.
"I do, I do," he said. "I just think it's a long putt. He's a businessman, and I think we've got to stick it out with him."
Trump will have the opportunity to convince more Iowans when he travels to Sioux City this week as part of his pre-midterm push.
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