Практика Shadowing: How America broke its beef industry - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

America's beef industry is broken.

I'm sure you've noticed that beef prices are crazy right now.

In June, the average price per pound of ground beef was the highest it's ever been.

At the same time, our national cattle herd is at its lowest point since the 50s.

Okay, so simple supply and demand, right?

Not quite.

As I've nerded out about the beef supply chain, the one thing I can guarantee is that there's nothing simple about this industry.

Tyson Foods, whose biggest business is actually beef, lost $426 million on it last year.

At the same time, our cow -calf ranchers, the ones who'd actually grow the herd, had their most profitable year ever recorded, and yet there's very little sign of expansion.

Nobody in this story is behaving the way they're supposed to.

The industry has run on a 10 to 13 year cycle for over a century.

Historically, it's self -corrected every time, but we might be at the moment that cycle isn't just jammed.

It could be completely broken.

So what the is going on with America's beef industry?

Hello sir.

Good to meet you in person.

I'm James.

Where do you want me parking this bad boy?

Just right here.

All right, I just pulled up to meet Justin and we're already in the midst of work.

There's one thing I've learned about cow -calf ranching, there are no days off, so let's try to

keep up I just want to show you some of these calves because

if they've been they were born a month earlier than a

lot of them we're gonna see for example what number is

he 30 this is a pretty good calf a lot of

muscle structure I think you might like the camera yep he's kind of showing off I wouldn't be surprised

if he doesn't weigh 600 pounds I mean he's pretty big already this is where buying

and selling happens as they come in we would merchandise those

cattle to the highest bidder how many cattle would we see here on a Friday you know

when we're busy in the fall can be eight nine thousand head at a time i suppose

that prairie dog will never show his face today yeah now

that we're prepared once they get to be a big colony they'll just take over the ground

and that's why we don't want them started here there he was running oh yeah you know

if you took a snapshot of the last 25 years less

than five of those are profitable years to understand what's broken

in america's beef industry we have to start with the cattle industry, the live animal side of the supply chain.

Think of it like a relay race, except every runner has to buy the baton from the one handing it to them.

It all starts at the cow -calf stage, the foundation of the entire industry.

The goal here is simple, one healthy calf from every cow, every year.

There are about 622 ,000 cow -calf operations in the country, and the average has just 47 cows.

More than half of them have fewer than 20.

Once a calf is weaned off the mother, it's sold.

The rancher decides when that happens, but the market decides how much it's worth.

Next comes the backgrounder.

The goal here is cheap weight gain on grass or wheat pasture.

Once a calf is big enough, boom, sold again.

Then comes the feedlot.

Time to fatten them up.

This is where the diet shifts to add weight fast using grain.

This stage is where real scale shows up.

About 7 % of feedlots handle 88 % of fed cattle.

82 of them can hold more than 50 ,000 cattle at a time.

Once the cattle have fattened up enough, boom, sold again.

Now we're at the packing and processing stage.

This is where cattle become beef.

The animal is slaughtered, broken down into large cuts, and shipped out as what the industry calls boxed beef.

This is the real choke point of the whole chain.

Four companies, Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef buy about 85 % of the steers and heifers sold for slaughter in the US.

Two of those four are controlled by Brazilian companies, by the way.

From there, retailers and restaurants sell the beef to you.

So there's our animal, five handoffs, five separate businesses.

Picture the whole chain as an hourglass, hundreds of thousands of ranchers at the top, millions of consumers at the bottom, and the narrowest point towards the end is controlled by just four companies.

One thing I hadn't anticipated, being the idiot that I am, is how hard it is to get groups of them.

To do what you want them to do, yeah.

Yeah, given how much land you have, you know.

God, it is gorgeous out here though.

Yeah, just to be nice if it was a little greener.

Yeah.

from everything i read about the cattle cycle the record high

prices are the thing that's supposed to drive ranchers to holding back more heifers

and expanding their herd is that a big misunderstanding did it used to be

that way well i think it was when we increase production here

and history will tell us we will increase production at some point

and then the prices will come down some and that's a supply

and demand that should work that way we should let

that work the way it's supposed to work

and for more than a century it did work that way

but a lot has changed inside the self -correcting system the industry calls the cattle cycle

when the herd shrinks cattle get scarce

and prices climb those high prices should convince cow calf ranchers to expand

but expanding means holding back heifers

that would otherwise keep moving down the supply chain this is

the heifer paradox to make more cattle later ranchers have to pull cattle out of the beef pipeline now

so to fix tomorrow's shortage, they have to make today's shortage worse.

Because of a cow's biology, it takes three years for all of those calves to hit the market.

Eventually, enough new cattle reach the market that supply catches up and prices fall.

Low prices convince ranchers to hold back fewer heifers, cull more cows, the herd shrinks, and you're back at step one.

To break it all down, prices move at market speed, but supply moves at cow biology speed.

That mismatch is the entire cycle.

From beginning to end, the cycle usually takes a little over a decade, but now the cycle seems to be jammed.

Cow -calf ranchers are coming off back -to -back record years.

The price signal is screaming expand, and yet there is very little sign of meaningful herd expansion.

So what are ranchers seeing that the market isn't?

Justin can see this industry from almost every angle.

His family has been ranching for four generations.

He sees hundreds of ranchers come through his sale barn, and he's the president of the United States Cattlemen's Association.

And who are you taking me to go see?

We're going to go see Clay Berklin, my banker

and he definitely has a perspective on what interest rates can have to do with expanding

100

and the drought and what's never said it seems like when we talk about how good the prices are

101

is how high our input costs are also at all -time highs

102

if you gave a thousand dollars an acre for this land

103

you could never just get out of debt by running cows on it so

104

when we talk about debt it's it's significant the numbers are so big today that if you

105

expand 10 percent you can be looking in the millions of

106

dollars pretty easily it's a big gamble what do you think

107

is the biggest misconception the average person has about this industry

108

and i guess specifically cow cap ranchers well i don't think

109

i can have this conversation without mentioning yellowstone where they think everybody

110

that has a ranch has a helicopter and a shiny black dually pickup

111

but that's made for tv entertainment the people

112

that do it every day i'll tell you it's just a

113

hell of a lot of work i think some of the heartiest people in the world are the cattle industry

114

because we've seen the ups and the downs and all we do is dust ourself off and come back for some more.

115

We get talked about as a commodity sometimes and it's not a commodity, it's a way of life.

116

This is my guy right here.

117

We're going to move some cows to a different pasture, is that right Jesse?

118

This is definitely the first time I've held this camera on a horse, that's for sure.

119

It's interesting to hear even through these record prices

120

which certainly you're not complaining about right

121

but that's not necessarily the thing that's going to drive expansion nope

122

and i wished it was that simple

123

but it definitely is not i think the biggest driver for

124

most of our guys is environment i mean it decides it for you

125

if you don't have the feed

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or you don't have the grass to run them it's impossible

127

to go into any kind of expansion i'll just tell you

128

about the fire drive by it on the to town

129

and then lightning started it back over that hill

130

and it burned right up to this road i mean look

131

at the difference between the left side of the road

132

and the right side of the road here oh my god

133

this is i mean it's devastating the state wildland guy measured

134

it at like 240 acres in a lot of ways that's

135

money literally getting burnt up in the fire oh absolutely

136

so is it currently a drought that you're in yes we i think

137

that we're in what they call a d4 drought

138

which was some of the worst the drought now goes from

139

canada to mexico through the heart of cow calf country

140

so you're not going to have a lot of luck talking those guys into expanding when

141

hay has gone from 100 a ton to 300 a ton

142

if you're going to keep some of your own heifers

143

that means this year calves bring in somewhere near 2500 a head you're not going to have

144

that income you're going to keep her as a calf you're

145

going to run her over the winter then you're going to turn her out on grass

146

and then she'll get bred

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and then it's a whole nother spring around before she has a calf

148

and then we don't know where we're going to be price wise.

149

The last time we had a great expansion opportunity a lot of folks got stung pretty badly.

150

They bet on the rising market and some of those cows took almost 10 years to pay for.

151

Do you run into situations here where a rancher who's maybe doesn't have heirs

152

or isn't encouraging his kids to get into the business is here essentially selling the lot

153

and cashing out yeah

154

and i mean i think in this environment we may see some more of

155

that this fall i would say

156

that the rancher's 401k was his cow herd an older generation

157

at some point is just going to say you know what

158

i don't need to expand anymore i'm going to start to open up the parachute

159

and coast into my comfortable landing

160

and i'm going to sell 2 500 cows at the highest

161

price in my life it's really hard to blame them

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if i offered you the highest return ever on your retirement portfolio

163

and you could step away would you i'm in my middle 50s

164

and i'm one of the youngest people you see i think

165

there's a big generational turnover to happen here uh in the next 10 years

166

and and we've got to make sure

167

that we've got these young people in a place where they can come back

168

and work on these ranches it feels to me there are like 15 to 25 things

169

that are determining whether a rancher is expanding and probably one

170

or two of them we have control of

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and the rest of it is out of our control okay so

172

if you can't blame ranchers alone what else is jamming the

173

machine the obvious place to start is four companies controlling 85 % of the processing.

174

You would think with beef at record high prices, they would be printing money.

175

They're not.

176

Tyson's beef business lost $426 million in 2025.

177

And in the first quarter of 2026, JBS's North American beef business posted a negative EBIT of $267 million.

178

So why are they losing so much money?

179

Cattle are so scarce that packers are paying record prices just to keep their plants running.

180

But the price of the beef they sell isn't rising as fast as the price of of the cattle they buy.

181

And because these massive plants cost about the same to run full or half empty, fewer animals means higher processing costs per head.

182

The response from the packers has been to shrink the machine.

183

Over the last couple of years, the major packers have been closing, converting, or selling beef facilities to match the smaller cattle herd.

184

But losing money doesn't mean losing power, because a big change from all that consolidation is not just what the packers earn, it's how they buy cattle.

185

So in 2005, over 52 % of all of the cattle were sold to the packers in the competitive cash market.

186

Now, the number is approximately less than 20 % remains in the cash market.

187

Wow.

188

And 80 % is now procured to these non -competitive means.

189

Meaning instead of bidding on finished cattle out in the open at auction, packers lock in a lot of their supply through contracts.

190

The price on most of those contracts is tied to whatever the shrinking negotiated market says that week.

191

So the roughly 20 % still trading in the open cash

192

market helps establish the price for the 80 % sold through contract.

193

Every major plant closure means fewer places for finished cattle to go.

194

Fewer slaughter slots means more leverage for the packers controlling them.

195

They can slow down their cash buying because most of their cattle are already lined up through contracts.

196

Now, these contracts exist for a reason.

197

They can guarantee the feedlot stability and predictability and can lock in a slaughter slot.

198

And if the cattle get a good USDA grade, they can earn a premium.

199

For an individual operator, signing that contract can make complete sense.

200

But add up enough individually rational decisions and you hollow out the open market

201

that the entire chain relies on to figure out what cattle are actually worth.

202

Then there are beef imports.

203

Here's where it gets political.

204

As ground beef was at record highs, the president told reporters that prices were higher than we want, but going to be coming down soon.

205

You know, Trump, he stands behind me every day.

206

When you're working, you can see him right back there.

207

I'm a big Trump supporter.

208

He's a capitalist, but he don't know shit about the cattle industry.

209

Argentina's quota quadrupled.

210

Brazil's tariff was cut by two -thirds, and beef futures were down before the ink dry.

211

More recently, the administration approved another 300 ,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings under the lower tariff rate.

212

Maybe that helps the price of ground beef, which no one can guarantee, by the way.

213

But to a rancher deciding whether to keep a heifer for two years, it sends a very different message.

214

The market can find foreign beef faster than you can grow a cow.

215

If they're going to take tariffs off of some of that meat coming in, why is beef going to be cheaper?

216

It's not.

217

It's going to line the pockets of the four big packers

218

because they'll buy it cheaper and they will have less quotas on it.

219

That doesn't mean they're going to pass it on to the consumer.

220

And then it hurts the backs of the American rancher

221

because they have an unfair undue advantage over production costs that we don't have.

222

So to ranchers, imports are competition, but to packers, they're another source of supply and revenue.

223

Remember, two of the big four packers are Brazilian owned.

224

So the same companies losing money buying American cattle are selling the Brazilian beef flowing in to replace it.

225

The reality is everybody in this chain has bad years.

226

That's just how a cyclical industry works.

227

But a bad year doesn't cost everyone the same thing.

228

The packers are diversified.

229

They can have a losing quarter or year

230

and lean on other sources of protein or operations in other countries to pay the bills.

231

But to ranchers, a bad year can be existential.

232

So in terms of resetting the cattle cycle, increased imports are keeping beef on shelves without the price getting insanely high,

233

and consumers are not opening the other release valve by buying much less of it.

234

And that's the thing about everything we've gone through.

235

Not one of these problems broke the industry on its own.

236

Through the last 40 years, consolidation left four companies buying and processing most of the country's cattle.

237

The packers bought less and less fed cattle, at free auction.

238

Repeated droughts reduced the herd, land, feed, equipment, labor, and financing became more expensive, imported beef became a much larger part of the system,

239

less and less of every dollar spent on beef made its way back to the ranchers, and two of the four dominant packers came under Brazilian control.

240

Every one of those problems was survivable by itself, but together they took out almost every shock absorber this industry has.

241

So now what?

242

How do you fix it?

243

Well, there's no shortage of ideas.

244

The first is to force the major packers to purchase some minimum share of their cattle through open auction

245

and less through contract.

246

And it nearly happened.

247

We were getting close to getting that minimum requirement for negotiated trade that we were pushing so hard from.

248

And NCBA and their big affiliates.

249

They were the ones fighting us.

250

The NCBA is the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the biggest and best funded group in the industry.

251

And the fact that they fought a reform other cattlemen wanted tells you something about how this industry works.

252

What used to be the National Cattlemen's Association, they merged in the mid -90s with the meatpackers themselves.

253

A lot of people in the cattle industry feel like they're

254

pushing harder for the bee in there than they are the seed.

255

You would think an industry in this situation would unite, But so many people I spoke to disagree on what the biggest problem is

256

and what the solution to that problem should be.

257

All the people I deal with, they own their own business.

258

They're an individual empire of their own, so to speak.

259

They're very used to making their own decisions.

260

So when I have to make them agree that the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, sometimes that's hard to do.

261

You know, it's hard to get 400 ,000 heads together.

262

It's easy to get four packers heads together, and they're taking advantage of that.

263

Another proposed solution is what the industry calls MCOOL, mandatory country of origin labeling, which was a thing until 2015 when it got repealed.

264

But this month, the Senate Ag Committee added it as an amendment to the Farm Bill, which still needs to pass.

265

But even if it passes, it's hard to know how much of a difference it would make or whether consumers would actually pay more for American beef.

266

They don't have the same safety protocols.

267

They don't have the same standards of raising cattle as we do.

268

So we don't want that to ride on the backs of the American rancher.

269

We're not saying it's going to be a big market driver necessarily, but we think it's an important piece and the consumer can choose.

270

The list of solutions goes on forever.

271

Enforced antitrust laws, build more regional processing plants, help young ranchers access cheaper capital.

272

All of those could help, but not one of them is simple.

273

That is the challenge here.

274

Almost every fix helps one stage of the relay race, but creates a new cost or problem somewhere else.

275

And an industry that can't agree on the diagnosis is definitely not going to agree on the cure.

276

People in the industry fear that the worst case scenario is that eventually all of our beef will be imported from overseas.

277

And that is not an entirely irrational fear.

278

It already happened with our lamb industry.

279

Are they being dramatic because this is their livelihoods?

280

Maybe, but can you f*ing blame them?

281

I can't.

282

I feel for these people.

283

Like I said, most of the producers, the people below the packing stage, are made up of normal people like you and I, likely working land their family has been on for generations.

284

This means something to them in a way that's difficult for me to articulate.

285

And to be honest, I feel for the packers too.

286

I don't want anybody losing money or losing their job.

287

And there are plenty of normal people like you and I that work there too.

288

Be mad at our government and the system we're in.

289

That is what has failed us.

290

Most of what we just walked through wasn't a corporate decision.

291

It was a policy decision over the course of 40 years under both parties.

292

I thought by the time I was this age or in this position in my life,

293

I wouldn't, you know, probably have some answers or maybe have a real thought as to exactly what the next 5, 10, 15 years might look like.

294

And man, I don't know.

295

You just got to get up every day and push and enjoy all the moments you have.

296

Look, to me, no animal is more tangled up in this country's identity than a cow.

297

Cowboys, the steakhouse, a backyard cheeseburger, and the people raising them, they were never the ones who broke this.

298

They just have the most to lose.

299

When's the last time you had a vacation?

300

Well, it depends on what you call a vacation.

301

We took a trip to Canada one time, and the first thing we did is stop at the first auction barn we saw.

302

We're kind of junkies that way.

303

That's just the way it is.

304

That's not a vacation, Justin.

305

It's probably not in most people's world, but it is for us.

306

When's the last time we were on a beach?

307

Not much interest in that time.

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Этот видеоролик помогает улучшить навык разговорного английского в контексте обсуждения сложных тем (в данном случае — индустрии мяса). Цель: научиться выражать мысли четко, используя специализированную лексику и структурировать речь при объяснении причин проблем. Это идеально подходит для тех, кто хочет достичь миляста в fluency — свободного владения языком в нестандартных ситуациях.

Банк фраз

"the supply chain" — цепочка поставок
"self-correcting cycle" — самокорректирующийся цикл
"cheap weight gain" — дешевое набирания веса
"real scale shows up" — проявляется реальный масштаб
"the market decides how much it's worth" — рынок определяет, сколько он стоит

Эти фразы можно использовать в обсуждениях экономики, индустрии или бизнеса. Например: "In our business, the supply chain is crucial for success" (В нашем бизнесе цепочка поставок имеет решающее значение для успеха).

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Видео отлично подходит для работы над произношением слов с длинными слогами (например, "profitable", "expansion", "merchandise") и ритмом речи при объяснении сложных идей. Чтобы улучшить произношение английского, используйте технику shadowing: повторяйте за спикером сразу после него, копируя интонацию и темп. Для практики подойдет любой shadowing site или приложение, где можно записать себя и сравнить с оригиналом. Учить английский по видео с помощью shadow speak — эффективный способ выработать естественную речь. Обратите внимание на паузы между предложениями: они помогают сделать речь более понятной, особенно при обсуждении сложных тем, как в этом клипе.

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Конструкции, которые говорящий использует чаще всего, с точными словами из видео:

Конструкция	В видео
«Used to» used to + глагол — прошлая привычка или состояние, которых больше нет	used to be · used to making
Present Perfect Continuous have/has been + -ing — действие началось раньше и продолжается	has been ranching · have been closing
Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас	you've noticed · I've nerded · has run
Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает	is broken · isn't just jammed · were born

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

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Что такое техника Shadowing?