09/06/2026
They announced a rancher package this month. Here's what it does for someone selling under 20 head a year: nothing.
Read the actual order. It doesn't let you sell meat off your place. It tells USDA to widen three programs that already existed — state inspection, Cooperative Interstate Shipment, Talmadge-Aiken. All three require your state to run its own inspection program.
Twenty-nine states run one. Washington isn't one of them. Neither is Idaho. Oregon, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming all are. So we've got a hole sitting right in the middle of the Inland Northwest, and every headline about selling across state lines stops at our line.
Here's what it actually does to us. The money is aimed at moving custom plants into inspected status. Every custom plant that converts pulls custom kill slots out of a market that's already twelve months out. Fewer slots, same demand, and you know what happens to the price. The overtime fee cut for small plants is real money — 75% off for very small, 30% for small — and it expires at the end of this fiscal year. When it lapses, that cost lands back in what your processor charges you.
And none of it puts an inspector in a plant. A plant legally cannot run without one present. You can subsidize overtime all day; you can't subsidize an inspector who was never hired.
What would actually change things for a small outfit is one line of federal law. Let a producer take an animal to a licensed custom butcher and sell it. One animal per package, no commingled grind, labeled for what it is. That's the PRIME Act. It's not in this package. It's sitting in the Farm Bill as a pilot that states have to opt into, and it hasn't passed.
Poultry already works this way. A producer can process and sell birds under an exemption written into the poultry statute. There's no equivalent for red meat. Same agency, same buyer, different law, and that's the whole reason you can't do it.
If you're in Washington or Idaho, the fight isn't in D.C. alone — it's also in Olympia and Boise, because neither state ever built the program all of this hangs on.
Nothing about how we do it changed this month. Cattle on feed at Ritzville, harvest at a USDA plant, same as always.
