America’s entire cattle industry depends on a market that is disappearing before our eyes: the negotiated cash cattle market. Restoring that market must be a priority as USDA and the Justice Department carry out the President’s executive order calling for stronger enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act.
The negotiated cash market is where cattle producers and packers bargain directly over price. Those transactions establish benchmarks used to price cattle sold through other arrangements. They also influence what feedlots can pay for feeder cattle, what stocker operators can pay for calves and, ultimately, what cow-calf producers receive.
Whether you sell finished cattle, yearlings or calves, this market affects your livelihood.
Yet the national negotiated cash share of cattle purchases fell from 52.1% in 2005 to just 17.8% in 2025. That is a decline of nearly two-thirds and the lowest annual share in the 21-year USDA series. These figures exclude negotiated-grid purchases, which are reported separately.
USDA has also documented regional cash transactions approaching zero in some weeks, notably in Texas and Kansas.
The damage to public price information is already visible. For the week ending Sept. 13, 2026, confidentiality restrictions prevented publication of negotiated cash prices in Texas–Oklahoma–New Mexico and Kansas. Colorado’s negotiated-purchase report remained withheld. Three of the five traditional reporting regions lacked these public cash prices.
Producers need competing bids and reliable information to evaluate them. A thin market puts both at risk.
When producers have fewer practical buyers, they can face delayed sales, additional feed and financing costs, and pressure to accept marketing arrangements they would otherwise reject. Packers can benefit when weakened competition lowers acquisition costs, including payments on cattle priced using cash-market benchmarks.
That is why the agencies must investigate how procurement practices weaken independent bidding, restrict producers’ selling opportunities and suppress prices below the level that competitive conditions would produce. They should also measure how that harm travels upstream to feeder-cattle, stocker and cow-calf operations.
Record cattle prices do not answer this question. The question is whether producers would receive more in a competitive market.
The Packers and Stockyards Act prohibits conduct undertaken for the purpose or with the effect of manipulating or controlling prices. USDA should use that authority to investigate specific practices and pursue enforcement supported by the evidence.
Investigators should examine whether packers agree to delay bidding, refrain from bidding during particular periods, divide suppliers or territories, or avoid competing against designated buyers. They should obtain bidding records, procurement instructions, communications and delivery schedules to establish what happened and who was harmed.
They should also investigate whether packers strategically back up market-ready cattle, redirect purchases outside the region that sets their contract prices, or use imported supplies to weaken domestic cash competition. Coordination with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission should examine suspected links between futures trading and manipulation of cash cattle prices.
R-CALF USA recommends three rulemaking proposals to strengthen these enforcement efforts.
First, prevent business justifications from excusing procurement practices demonstrated to reduce competition and thereby manipulate or control cattle prices. Once that harm is established, calling the practice a business strategy should not provide a shield.
Second, remove the separate competitive-injury prerequisite under Section 202(a). Producers should be able to challenge unfair, unjustly discriminatory or deceptive practices without also proving harm to competition across the broader market.
Third, require minimum weekly negotiated cash purchases at each covered cattle slaughtering plant, regardless of common ownership. Each plant must meet its own obligation. Companies should not satisfy that requirement by pooling purchases across plants or counting negotiated-grid transactions that merely use a reported cash benchmark.
USDA should establish regional standards that support genuine independent bidding, timely market access and representative price discovery. Reporting reforms must accompany those standards so producers regain useful regional price information.
Where statutory barriers prevent effective action, USDA and the Justice Department should seek targeted legislation from Congress. Congress can expressly establish these protections and provide the authority needed to enforce them.
Success must be measured where it matters: Can producers obtain competing bids, sell cattle promptly and evaluate offers using reliable prices?
These are steps toward restoring producers’ bargaining power and preserving opportunities for the next generation of ranchers.
Restoring the negotiated cash market protects the entire cattle production chain. The President has called for stronger enforcement. USDA, the Justice Department and Congress must now deliver meaningful competition for America’s independent cattle producers.
