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The beef you buy at grocery stores must now be labeled with the country where it’s from. Proponents of the new rule argue it gives Americans more information about the beef they’re buying. But some say the labels are hurting business. Download MP3

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MARCO WERMAN: If you’ve bought any beef at the grocery store lately, you may have noticed the labels. They’re required to state the beef’s country of origin. Proponents say the labels give Americans more information about their food and that they’re a marketing boon for American beef producers. But as The World’s Jason Margolis found out in Kansas, some beef producers say the labels are hurting their business.

JASON MARGOLIS:  Next time you buy some steak, if the label says product of Mexico this may be how your beef got here. A young steer begins its northward passage at a border town in New Mexico or Texas. There, it’s inspected by American authorities. Then the steer is trucked up to the grassy plains of Eastern Kansas. This is the good life for cattle, wide open spaces. Clifton Cole, a tough looking stereotype of a western cowboy, runs the show here.

CLIFTON COLE:  They were shipped up here and they weighed right at 500 pounds when we got them. So, we’ll run them on grass here for approximately 90 days, and then they’ll go into the feedyard…

MARGOLIS: …where cows are put in pens and fed a corn diet. You can smell the feed yard, the stench of manure, from a mile away. You get used to it though says Dave Lowe, the feed yard manager.

DAVE LOWE: I started feeding cattle in 1965. And I don’t think I’ve smelled any odor since 1970.

MARGOLIS: A small fence separates the Mexican-born cattle from the American ones. Lowe says it’s easy to spot the Mexican steers.

LOWE: They’ve got an M branded on the right hip. There’s one, the black one there. Shows up real good. And then the metal ear tags.

MARGOLIS: Both the Mexican and American steers are given the same shots. They eat the same food.  If a disease outbreak were to happen here, all the cattle would be affected. By the time the Mexican steers are ready for slaughter, they’ll have spent the majority of their lives in Kansas, roughly tripling in weight. About 5% of beef sold in the US started as Mexican or Canadian calves. When the steers in Kansas are packaged as beef, they’ll carry a label that reads product of Mexico, or product of USA and Mexico. Here’s what Dave Lowe thinks of the labeling requirement.

LOWE: It’s just a tremendously big pile of male, bovine fecal material.

MARGOLIS: Matt Teagarden of the Kansas Livestock Association would choose his words differently, but he shares Dave Lowe’s sentiment.

MATT TEAGARDEN:  If we graze those cattle in the Flint Hills for a summer, and then feed them in one of our western Kansas feed yards, and then process them here and take cattle, make it into beef, the vast majority of the value has been created here in the states.

MARGOLIS: Teagarden says he’s not opposed to people knowing more about their food.  Neither is Bill Haw. He owns the Mexican-born cattle I saw at the Kansas feed yard. He says country labeling costs him money. And while Kansas is overflowing with slaughterhouses, they won’t take his cattle anymore.

BILL HAW: Many packers refuse to accept Mexican cattle at all. And the problems are simply the problems of segregating the product and having to sell it into different channels.

MARGOLIS: Haw now has to truck his cattle up to Nebraska. He’s found a slaughterhouse there that will take his beef, but it pays him less money. That’s the charge for the inconvenience of keeping his Mexican meat separate. OK, fine. The country of origin labeling rules mean more hassle and less money for Haw and some other large American ranchers who import cattle. The tradeoff though is that you get to know more about your food. And that’s a good thing, argues Chandler Goule at the National Farmers Union in Washington.

CHANDLER GOULE: When you go to other countries, Canada has country of origin labeling laws on other products. When you go to Japan, you can literally take the beef up to a barcode scanner and it shows you the picture of the producer himself and where he lived. So this isn’t a new idea or anything along those lines.

MARGOLIS: Goule, and many others, argue that American consumers have a right to know as much as possible about what they’re eating.

GOULE: Especially with a lot of the food safety concerns that we have with the food that’s imported. Everyday you see more and more reports out about where your food is coming from, or what’s happened in this country and I think it gives our consumers an assurance when they pick this product up and they know it was made, slaughtered, and processed, here in the United States.

MARGOLIS: But the US Department of Agriculture says country of origin labeling is not about food safety. And Chandler Goule concedes that labeling hasn’t made US beef any safer. So what exactly does country of origin labeling offer the beef consumer? Not much, says ag economist Ted Schroeder at Kansas State University.

TED SCHROEDER:  It’s purely a label change because the product itself, the eating experience, the desirability, the freshness, everything else about the product has remained unchanged here.

MARGOLIS: And since beef is effectively unchanged, Schroeder says it’s hard for American ranchers who import cattle to charge higher prices to offset their higher costs. Rancher Bill Haw says he had no choice. Last year, he had to stop importing Mexican cattle. He argues that country of origin labeling is setting back his industry and the flow of trade between Canada, the United States and Mexico.

HAW: The sole motivation to have country of origin labeling is demand for a protectionist tariff by small beef producers, who fear the competition of the other cattle coming in.

MARGOLIS: When Haw found the Nebraska slaughterhouse that would take his Mexican-born cattle, he began importing again, but less than in years past. He’d like to import more and Canada and Mexico would like American cattle ranchers to do that. Those countries are suing the United States at the World Trade Organization. They argue that the new American labeling rule amounts to a trade barrier, discriminating against their beef and livestock. If Mexico and Canada win their suit, it could change the rules yet again for the way your beef is labeled. For The World, I’m Jason Margolis, Kansas City, Kansas.

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