Four Meatpackers and the Price of Your Groceries

In 1919, the Federal Trade Commission delivered a report to Congress about the meat business, and it read like an indictment. Five companies, Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson and Cudahy, the commission found, dominated the buying of livestock and the selling of meat across the country, and they coordinated rather than competed. They controlled stockyards, rail cars and cold storage, and they had moved into groceries far beyond meat. Farmers selling cattle faced the same handful of buyers wherever they went; shoppers faced the same handful of sellers. Within months the Justice Department pressed the companies into a consent decree that forced them out of many side businesses, and in 1921 Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act to police how meatpackers bought animals and set prices. A century later, if you buy a steak at any supermarket in America, it very likely came from one of four companies. Two of the four are controlled by companies founded in Brazil.

In short: Beef processing in the United States is dominated by four firms, Tyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef, which together handle roughly 85 percent of the fed cattle slaughtered, and pork is also highly concentrated. Ranchers say the packers' buying power holds down what they are paid, while shoppers face high retail prices, and the 1921 law meant to prevent that has been weakly enforced for decades.

How a broken-up industry came back together

The 1920s reforms worked for a while. Through the middle of the twentieth century, meatpacking became more competitive, with regional packers and many buyers at public stockyards. Then, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the industry changed shape. New companies built huge plants near the feedlots of the Great Plains, cutting carcasses into boxed portions instead of shipping whole sides of beef to city butchers. The new model was cheaper and faster, and it rewarded size.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of mergers combined these firms, and antitrust enforcers under administrations of both parties largely allowed them. By the end of the century, a handful of companies controlled most of the beef processing in the country. Pork followed a similar path, with packers increasingly owning hogs or contracting with farmers to raise them.

Today the four largest beef packers are Tyson Foods, based in Arkansas; JBS, a Brazilian company that is one of the world's largest meat processors; Cargill, a privately held agricultural giant in Minnesota; and National Beef, majority-owned by Marfrig, another Brazilian company. Together, by the Agriculture Department's figures, they process roughly 85 percent of the grain-fed cattle slaughtered in the country.

The hourglass

Economists who study food chains often describe them as an hourglass. At the top are many sellers: hundreds of thousands of cattle producers, from small cow-calf operations in the hills of Kentucky to big ranches in Montana. At the bottom are hundreds of millions of shoppers. In the narrow middle sit a few processors, through which almost everything must pass.

An hourglass gives the firms in the middle power in both directions. When there are only a few buyers for a product, economists call it monopsony power, the mirror image of monopoly. A rancher with a pen of finished cattle cannot sell them to a grocery store; she needs a packer, and in many regions, only one or two are practical to reach. That limits her bargaining power. At the other end, the same firms supply most of the beef in the supermarket case.

The question that ranchers and consumer groups have pressed for years is whether the packers use that position to widen the gap between what they pay for cattle and what they get for beef. That gap, the packer's margin, has at times swung dramatically. During the pandemic in 2020, when plant closures backed up animals on farms, cattle prices fell while retail beef prices rose, and packer margins hit extraordinary levels. Shoppers paid more; ranchers received less; the middle did very well.

Pork and chicken took the same road, faster

Beef at least still has independent ranchers who own their animals until the day they sell them. Much of the pork and chicken business went further, toward a model in which the processor controls almost every step.

In pork, a few large companies handle most of the hogs slaughtered in the country, and many of the animals are raised under contract. The largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, was bought in 2013 by a Hong Kong-based company now called WH Group, a sale that raised questions in Congress about foreign ownership of the food supply. Contract hog farmers typically own the barns and the debt that built them, while the company owns the pigs and the feed and sets the terms.

Chicken went furthest. In most of the broiler industry, the big processors own the birds, the feed mills, the hatcheries and the slaughter plants. Farmers, called growers, build the chicken houses, often with large loans, and raise flocks under contract. Growers have long been paid under a system often called the tournament, in which a grower's pay depended on how his flock performed compared with those of his neighbors, on chicks and feed he did not choose. Growers complained that it left them carrying the debt and the risk while the company held the power. During the Biden administration, the Agriculture Department wrote new rules requiring companies to give growers more information about how their pay is calculated.

The details differ by species, but the pattern is the same. When a few processors sit between the farm and the store, farmers become something closer to contractors, and the terms of their work are set by the company. Defenders say contracts provide steady income and shield growers from swings in commodity prices. Critics answer that steady income on terms you cannot negotiate is not the same as a fair deal. Both have seen the industry from the inside; the policy question is who should bear the risk.

How cattle get priced, and why ranchers distrust it

Beyond the number of firms, the way cattle are bought has shifted. Once, most animals were sold for cash on open markets, where prices were set in public. Over recent decades, a growing share has been sold through formula pricing and long-term contracts, often tied to a reported cash price. As the cash market thinned, the reported prices became based on fewer and fewer transactions, which made them easier to influence and harder to trust.

Ranchers' groups have argued that this structure lets the packers set the price. Proposals in Congress have tried to require that a minimum share of cattle be bought on the open cash market, to restore real price discovery. Packers and some large feeding operations have opposed such mandates, arguing that contracts give producers stable outlets and reward quality.

There have also been lawsuits. Class actions have accused the largest beef and pork packers of conspiring to cut production and raise prices. Several companies, including JBS, have paid settlements to resolve some of these claims without admitting wrongdoing. Others continue to deny the allegations. Those cases are a reminder that the question is not hypothetical.

The strongest case for big packers

The industry's defenders make an argument worth hearing. Large plants are efficient. Scale lowered the cost of processing beef dramatically over the last half-century, and some of those savings reached consumers in the form of cheaper meat than earlier generations could afford. A meatpacking plant requires huge capital, strict food-safety systems and a large workforce; small plants struggle with the fixed costs.

Defenders also point to the forces that move beef prices regardless of who processes it. The national cattle herd shrank to its smallest size in about seventy years by the mid-2020s, after years of drought in ranching country forced producers to sell off cows. Feed costs, labor shortages and disease outbreaks also matter. When supply falls and demand stays strong, prices rise even in a competitive market.

Those points are real. Concentration is not the only thing moving beef prices. But they do not explain the margin swings, or the thinning cash market, or the settlements. And efficiency arguments cut both ways: if a few giant plants handle most of the country's beef, then a fire, a cyberattack or a disease outbreak at one plant can disrupt the national supply, as the pandemic showed. Concentration makes the system cheaper in good years and more fragile in bad ones.

The 1921 law nobody fully used

The Packers and Stockyards Act gave the Agriculture Department authority to stop unfair, discriminatory and deceptive practices by packers. For much of its history, though, courts read the law narrowly, often requiring proof that a practice harmed competition across the whole industry, not just that it hurt a particular producer. That made it hard to use against the everyday conduct ranchers complained about.

Administrations have tried to clarify the rules, and those efforts have tended to swing with the party in power. The Obama administration proposed rules that were scaled back under pressure. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order on competition that directed the Agriculture Department to strengthen enforcement, and the department finalized rules on unfair practices and funded the expansion of independent processing plants. The Trump administration has taken its own steps: in November 2025, the president directed the Justice Department to investigate meatpackers over beef prices.

That last episode is worth noting for its rare overlap. Concern about packer power is one of the few economic issues where rural Republicans, independent ranchers' groups and progressive antitrust advocates agree. When a Republican president and a Democratic Senate's farm-state members say similar things about the same four companies, a durable bipartisan reform may be possible.

Who loses when four firms decide

Start with the ranchers. The number of cattle operations has been falling for decades, and many families who raised cattle for generations have given up. Ranchers do not all agree on the cause; drought, land prices and age all play a role. But many tell the same story about selling into a market where they have few buyers and little information.

Then the workers. Meatpacking is dangerous, physically punishing work, and many plants depend on immigrant labor in small towns across Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Texas. During the pandemic, plants became sites of large outbreaks. When a single employer dominates a town, workers have fewer options too.

Then the shoppers. Beef prices have been high in recent years, and food at the grocery store remains one of the most visible pressures on family budgets. Concentration does not explain every dollar of that. But in a market with only a few large sellers, there is less pressure for savings to be passed on.

And then the towns. When a packer closes a plant, a rural community can lose its largest employer overnight. When small independent plants close, local ranchers lose an outlet and local butchers lose a supplier.

What a fair market would look like

Here's the case, as I see it, for what a progressive meat policy would include:

1. Enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act as written, with clear rules that a producer does not need to prove industry-wide harm to challenge unfair treatment.
2. Restore price discovery by ensuring a meaningful share of cattle trade happens in transparent cash markets.
3. Scrutinize mergers and foreign takeovers in food processing with a presumption against further concentration.
4. Back independent and regional processors, so ranchers have more buyers and towns have more stable employers.
5. Protect workers with enforceable safety standards on line speeds and conditions.

Shoppers have a stake in one more fight: knowing where their meat comes from. Congress repealed mandatory country-of-origin labels for beef and pork in 2015, after the World Trade Organization ruled against the American labeling rules in a dispute brought by Canada and Mexico. Ranchers' groups have pushed ever since to bring some form of labeling back, arguing that beef raised abroad can be processed here and sold under labels that suggest otherwise. Packers and some trade groups have opposed new mandates. It is a modest question compared with market structure, but it is one where a shopper's own choices could reward the domestic producers who have been squeezed hardest.

None of this requires nostalgia for a time before refrigerated trucks. It requires treating food as the kind of market where a few gatekeepers should not decide what everyone else is paid and what everyone else pays.

What you can do

• Contact your members of Congress about meatpacking competition bills, including cash-market and country-of-origin labeling proposals. Find your representative and senators by address.
• Watch for USDA rules open to comment. Rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act go through public comment; check the open federal comment periods list for food and agriculture rules closing soon.
• See which bills cross the aisle. The common-ground tracker shows legislation both parties passed together, which is where competition fixes in agriculture are most likely to land.
• Follow the bigger fight over market power. Our page on corporate power collects reporting on concentration in food, health care and tech.
• Buy from local and regional processors when you can, and support food banks that serve families squeezed by grocery prices; the organizations directory lists food banks in every state.

A century ago, Congress looked at five meatpackers and decided that was too few. It is worth asking what that Congress would think of four.