Beef costs more this fall than it did a year ago, the cattle herd is the smallest in decades, and the farm bill's extension ran out on September 30 without the stopgap spending law renewing it. On October 5 the Attorney General and the Secretary of Agriculture signed an amended and expanded agreement to police competition in farm inputs. Underneath all of that sits one plain question for anyone who raises animals or plants a crop: how many buyers are there for what you sell, how many sellers for what you need, and what does the law do about it?
This piece lays out the numbers, the law and the state of play as of mid-October 2026. It is written for a small producer, not a litigator.
The numbers: four firms in beef and pork, two in seed
USDA publishes the concentration figures itself. Its Packers and Stockyards Division released its combined annual report for 2023 and 2024 in September 2026. The four largest packers slaughtered 82 percent of federally inspected steers and heifers in calendar year 2024, up from 77 percent in 2023. The four largest hog packers handled 64 percent of market hogs. Cows and bulls, the animals behind most ground beef, are less concentrated at 47 percent.
The same report shows how fed cattle change hands. Formula pricing covered 65 percent of fed cattle procurement in 2024, forward contracts about 7 percent, negotiated grid sales 11 percent, and the open cash market only 18 percent. That thin cash share matters, because the formulas that price the other four fifths are usually tied to it.
The long view comes from the Economic Research Service. Its 2023 report Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness traces the four-firm share of steer and heifer slaughter from 36 percent in 1980 to 81 percent in 1995 and 85 percent in 2019. Hogs went from 34 to 67 percent over the same years. The report cites a 2005 study whose authors knew of no mature American industry that had changed its concentration so dramatically in so short a time. In a 2024 Amber Waves summary, author James MacDonald explains the twist: for decades the lower costs of bigger plants more than offset the price effect of fewer buyers, but since 2016, with plant capacity tight, packers have been able to reduce the prices paid for cattle.
Seed is the same story with fewer players. The ERS report puts the four-firm share of corn seed at 80 percent and soybean seed at 75 percent by 2016 to 2017, before the Bayer and Monsanto and Dow and DuPont mergers closed, and cottonseed at 94 percent in 2018 to 2020. By 2018 to 2020 two companies, Bayer and Corteva, accounted for 72 percent of planted corn acres and 66 percent of soybean acres. ERS economists Keith Fuglie and James MacDonald add the price side: average seed prices paid by farmers rose 270 percent between 1990 and 2020, while the prices farmers received for their crops rose 56 percent.
What the Packers and Stockyards Act says
The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 is older than most of the antitrust tools farmers hear about, and it was written for them. Section 202, codified at 7 U.S.C. 192, makes it unlawful for a packer, swine contractor or live poultry dealer to use "any unfair, unjustly discriminatory, or deceptive practice or device", to give any undue or unreasonable preference to one person or locality, to manipulate or control prices, to apportion territory, or to conspire with anyone else to do any of that.
The Agricultural Marketing Service enforces it. Its Packers and Stockyards page states the purpose in Congress's words: to assure fair competition and fair trade practices and to safeguard farmers and ranchers. The same page carries the complaint channels: PSDComplaints@usda.gov, the toll-free line 1-833-342-5773, and the joint USDA and Justice Department portal at farmerfairness.gov.
Two limits are worth knowing. The Act does not cap market share; the 2023 to 2024 report says concentration is not in itself a violation, though it can facilitate practices that are. And it does not reach seed. Seed lives under the Sherman Act and patent law, which is why the Justice Department matters there and USDA mostly does not.
Where USDA's rulemaking stands
Since 2023 USDA has finished two Packers and Stockyards rules, dropped one, put one on ice, and left one question open.
Finished and in force: the Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments rule, effective February 12, 2024, and the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity rule, effective May 6, 2024. The second one prohibits discrimination against producers on a prohibited basis, retaliation against a producer who speaks to a regulator, a lawmaker or an association, and deception in forming, performing, ending or refusing a contract. Both rules still stand.
Dropped: the Fair and Competitive Livestock and Poultry Markets proposed rule of June 2024 would have spelled out what counts as an unfair practice and a harm to competition under section 202. AMS withdrew it on January 16, 2025, four days before the change of administration, citing the feedback it had received in the comments.
On ice: the Poultry Grower Payment Systems and Capital Improvement Systems rule, finalized that same January with an effective date of July 1, 2026, would have barred tournament systems that deduct from a grower's base pay rate. On June 1, 2026 AMS delayed it to December 31, 2027 "to allow time for further consideration of actions that may be taken regarding the disposition of the rule", after more than 2,800 comments, and noted that the 2021 competition executive order it rested on was revoked in August 2025.
Open: the advance notice on price discovery in fed cattle markets of October 2024 asked whether to cap the use of thin regional cash benchmarks in formula contracts, limit packer exclusivity deals and ban delayed pickup of purchased cattle. Its fact sheet put the share of cattle bought under alternative marketing agreements above 70 percent and the negotiated cash share below 20. Comments closed on January 10, 2025 after a thirty-day extension, and nothing further has been published in the Federal Register since. USDA's interim report on meat merchandising of October 2024, which found conduct among retailers, distributors and packers that may violate the Act, has likewise not been followed by a final report that we could find as of mid-October 2026.
What the Justice Department has done
The Antitrust Division has been the more active enforcer since 2025, and its cases say something about how the agencies now see the problem: less as market share, more as conduct.
The longest-running case is U.S. v. Agri Stats, filed in Minnesota in September 2023 against the data firm that collected and redistributed detailed price, cost, output and margin information among the largest chicken, pork and turkey processors. On May 7, 2026 the Division and six states filed a proposed settlement. Agri Stats would stop sharing sales reports and non-public pricing, stop reporting facility-level production, cost and labor data, share nothing that is on average less than 45 days old, open most of its reports to any buyer on equal terms, and answer to a court-appointed monitor for seven years. The judgment would run ten years. The case page still showed the proposed judgment awaiting the court's entry when this piece was written.
Seed got two actions in one month. On May 11, 2026 the Division filed a statement of interest in a Delaware patent case, Corteva v. Inari, arguing that in a seed industry it called highly concentrated with high barriers to entry, patents must deliver the public disclosure that lets others build on them. On May 20 it announced commitments from Bayer: the company had removed a provision of its loyalty program for independent seed companies that made discounts depend on hitting sales targets for both corn and soybeans, dropped incentives that could discourage those companies from licensing competitors' technology, and promised not to bring either back for seven years.
The frame around all of this is the USDA and DOJ partnership. A working-level memorandum signed in September 2025 set up regular consultation on feed, fertilizer, fuel, seed and equipment. On October 5, 2026 Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary Brooke Rollins amended and expanded it, this time naming pesticides among the inputs and pointing anyone with a livestock or poultry complaint to farmerfairness.gov. It names no case and sets no deadline. It is a statement of intent, and intent is what the next year will test.
The farm bill lapse and the stopgap
The 2018 farm bill has been living on extensions. The November 2025 funding law, Public Law 119-37, carried its authorities to September 30, 2026. The stopgap signed on September 2, 2026, Public Law 119-103, funds the government through December 11, 2026, but it contains no farm bill extension. The programs that need one are in the limbo we described last year in what happens when the farm bill lapses. The Farm Bureau's September 14 analysis puts it bluntly: Congress must pass a five-year farm bill this year.
One line in the stopgap matters directly to cattle and hog sellers. Section 119 extends the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act to December 11, 2026. That is the law that makes packers report what they pay, and the published reports are the only window a small seller has into the bids the big feedlots get. If the stopgap lapses without a successor, so does the window.
What concentration means at your scale
The price effect is not abstract this year. Beef and veal prices rose 5.9 percent in the year to August 2026, and USDA projects 9.4 percent for the year, as farmdoc daily summarizes, with the beef cow herd at 28.5 million head on July 1 and a calf crop of 32.5 million expected, down 2 percent from last year. ERS counts the national herd at 86.7 million cattle at the start of 2025, 8 percent below its 2019 peak. A tight supply should be a seller's market. Yet the Farm Bureau's September 23 survey found that after a late-August proclamation expanded the lean beef import quota by 300,000 metric tons, ground beef in 41 stores fell by 16 cents a pound, while cattle futures and cash prices in many regions fell and the Farm Bureau put the losses to ranchers at up to $300 to $400 a head. When there are four buyers, a policy aimed at the retail shelf lands first on the ranch.
Concentration also shapes your options, not just your price. A producer with one plant within hauling distance takes that plant's kill dates, its grading, its terms. The spring of 2020 showed what that dependence costs, as we wrote at the time in How Fragile Is Our Meat Production System? A broiler grower has one integrator. A corn grower choosing among dealers is mostly choosing among licensees of the same two trait owners. None of that is illegal. All of it narrows the room you have to negotiate, which is why the conduct rules above, on retaliation, deception and undue preference, are the parts of the law a small producer is most likely to use.
Options inside your control
Watch the reports. The mandatory price reports are free, published daily, and the only independent check on what you are offered. Build your cost of production around them.
Sell past the four. Direct sales by the half, quarter and bundle, state-inspected plants and the PRIME Act debate, the small plants built since 2020 that we covered in the processing bottleneck, and producer cooperatives that pool enough volume to reach a grocer or an institution: each one is a second buyer, and a second buyer is the whole point. That was the case for decentralization we made in 2020, and the farms in our farms and ranches directory are mostly there because they built one.
Put it in writing and report it. Since May 2024 retaliation for talking to a regulator or joining an association is itself a violation. Keep every contract, every settlement sheet, every message. Use the AMS complaint line and farmerfairness.gov. A complaint with documents behind it is the raw material of the next case.
Ask your seed dealer the licensing question. Which traits in this bag are licensed from whom, what are the independent alternatives, and what does the loyalty program require? The Bayer commitments exist because the Antitrust Division asked exactly that.
Show up. The poultry pay rule alone drew more than 2,800 comments on its delay, and the agency cited them when it acted. The farm bill is being written now. Being involved is not a slogan; it is the difference between rules written about you and rules written with you. The groups in our organizations directory that work on competition will tell you where the next window opens.
The arc of these markets took forty years to bend. It will not bend back in one, whatever any memorandum says. What a small farm can do is think long term, keep more than one door open, and treat every honest price report, every second buyer and every documented complaint as a brick in the wall between your farm and the price takers' corner.