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For most ranchers, the hardest part isn’t raising the cattle, but what happens after they leave the farm. Once they’re loaded onto someone else’s truck, so is most of the control. Processing, distribution and, too often, the biggest share of the profit all belong to somebody else.
Steven McBee Jr. looked at that system years ago and decided he wasn’t going to keep playing by its rules.
So while Washington is now investing up to $500 million to strengthen small and midsize meat processors , the 33-year-old rancher has spent the better part of a decade building his own way around the bottleneck.
Credit: Steven McBee Jr.
“Everybody in this industry gets told to raise your cattle, sell them into the commodity system and take the price you’re given,” McBee said. “We looked at that and thought, Why stop there? If we wanted more control over our future, we had to own more of what came next.”
It’s the mindset that built McBee Farm & Cattle Co. on a first-generation family farm in Gallatin, Missouri, where McBee works alongside his father, Steve Sr., and brothers Jesse, Cole and Brayden. There was no inherited land, no inherited cattle, no generations-old banking relationships. What the McBees did have, they put on camera.
Since The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys premiered in 2024, viewers have watched the family build the business in real time, setbacks and all. “We never wanted the polished version,” McBee explained. “The equipment failures and the expensive lessons made the cut right alongside the wins, and that’s the point. It’s the same fight every farmer and rancher in America is in right now.”
The numbers behind that fight are brutal. The four largest beef packers controlled about a quarter of the U.S. market in the early 1970s. Today, they handle roughly 85 percent of U.S. beef processing , leaving independent producers with few options once their cattle are ready for market. Add rising input costs and unpredictable weather on top, and the margins go from thin to gone.
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