Where There Are Cattle, There Is Freedom • Op-Ed By Steve Lucie, Awake IL Director and 5th Gen Cattle Rancher

Cattleman Steve Lucie, @cattleguy92. on X • 5th-generation rancher in Basco, IL, Owner of Lucie Cattle Co., Director of Awake Illinois

"Where There Are Cattle, There Is Freedom"

That is not a slogan for a bumper sticker. It is the plain truth of this country. The independent American rancher is one of the last people still living by old time—feeding a nation with real meat and feeding the fire of hope at the same time.

If we go, so goes the country.

Look at the numbers without blinking. Retail beef drops a couple of percent. Finished cattle drop fifteen. The customer saves fourteen cents on a package of ground beef. The rancher loses nearly six hundred dollars a head on the same animal. Illinois fat cattle fall from $261 a hundredweight into the high teens after a plant shuts—six hundred dollars a head again for the feeders standing closest to the wreck.

The Big Four do not feel that. Independent ranchers do.

The herd is not built on manipulated markets. Packers buy cheaper imported product, water it down like cheap whiskey, and send it downstream to the big buyers. Tariff games and short-term imports look like relief at the grocery store. They are a signal to the man on the ranch: do not grow the herd. Drop the price off the farm and you slow the rebuild of the American cattle inventory. Without mandatory country-of-origin labeling, you slowly phase out the independent operator. Without a strong American beef herd, you do not remain a strong, free, sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, diesel is crushing the people who actually move cattle, bale hay, and keep the combine ready. Corn at six dollars is still two dollars too cheap once you adjust for the inflation in everything else it takes to run a place. Check the fuel price this morning. Then tell a rancher his commodity should stay cheap while every input he buys goes the other direction.

This work is not a hobby, and it is not a TED Talk.

Treating a lame calf on rough ground at fifty-seven years old means knowing how to rope, how to hold a six-hundred-pound animal without getting killed, and how to doctor the wound without wrecking the calf or yourself. Most people never learn it. If a rancher has three or four kids, it is a stroke of luck if one wants this life. A kid who did not grow up in it almost never chooses it. We need to build ranchers almost as badly as we need to build the herd.

That is why you buy local when you can. A whole animal from the man who raised it, processed and in the freezer, can still land around eight dollars a pound for the customer. Farm-to-table is not a boutique phrase. It is the supply chain that keeps the independent operator alive and puts honest beef on your table instead of a diluted product with a pretty label.

In Illinois, you do not have to guess who still raises it. Awake Illinois volunteers compiled a ranch-to-table beef resource list so families can find American-raised cattle without going through the packer bottleneck. You can view the list at awakeIL.com/beef. The spreadsheet has five tabs for different categories. The list is compiled, not paid advertising, and not a rubber-stamp endorsement—verify the farm yourself, talk to the rancher, and buy with your eyes open. If you know a producer who belongs on it, send an email to info@awakeIL.com. That is how you build the other half of the herd: customers who know the difference.

In the wake of the anniversary of September 11, a man can work all day, remember, and watch his own sons grow up and put on the uniform because that day stuck in a child’s mind. Patriotism is not a parade. It is living your freedom every morning you get up and go do the job nobody else wants. The American rancher does not submit to the whims of overreaching government or concentrated packer power. We are the last frontier of people who have not forgotten time.

Cattlemen: do not quit. Do not sell the cows because the market was rigged this month. Look at every side of the business, admit when you are wrong, and still refuse the fake-meat money and the import flood that would finish what the margins started. Patriots: a nation that cannot feed itself on its own grass and grain is not independent, no matter what the flag on the package says. Beef buyers: ask where the animal lived. Pay the rancher when you can. Demand the label that tells the truth. If you are in Illinois, start at awakeIL.com/beef and put a local name on your next freezer fill.

The money in the grocery case is not all landing on the ranch. The narrative that “beef is too high” leaves out who actually got squeezed. Tiny ropes—packers, taxes, fuel, land, labor, fertilizer—are trying to pull Gulliver down. We still have to make sure the American rancher does not disappear.

Buy American. Eat real meat. Stand with the people who still know how to raise it. Where there’s beef, there’s freedom. Build back the herd. Keep both.