Wil Bledsoe runs a 20,000-acre farm on Colorado’s northeastern plains with his brother, Jim, and father, Bill — roughly 800 to 1,000 head of cattle alongside 2,500 acres of corn, wheat, and grain sorghum. BBTW editor Peter Green caught up with him to talk about how tariffs, trade policy, drought, and packer consolidation are reshaping the economics of American ranching and farming.

With all the tariff and trade policy shifts — including cheaper beef coming in from Mexico — how has that affected your operation?

Honestly, the border being closed probably helped our bottom line as much as anything. Foreign cattle — and not just picking on Mexico — can be raised so much cheaper because they don’t have the red tape we have: workmen’s comp, minimum wage, land taxes, on and on. Their cost of production is a fraction of ours. We just can’t compete. It’s the same as cell phones, computers, tennis shoes — they undercut us and dump supply into the industry, and they love keeping demand down for American beef by flooding us with foreign beef.

There’s been talk of loosening restrictions to let in more Mexican beef and keep consumer prices down. What’s your take?

On concept, that makes sense — no different than dumping cheap shoes on our market. But retailers have such a strong hold on this that I don’t think it works the way people assume. There’s only a handful of grocery chains controlling a huge percentage of sales, and they’re moving as much beef as they can handle right now at these prices. The demand is there. So if cheap cattle comes in from Mexico, the grocery stores aren’t going to lower prices — they’re just going to pocket a higher margin.

And the Big Four processors, Tyson $TSN , JBS $JBS, Cargill and National Beef, how do they factor in?

They seem to make a killing, to be honest. A steer carcass in America right now runs roughly $3,500. They can buy one from Brazil for maybe $1,500, ship it up here for $500, and still sell it for the same $3,500 [as chilled, boxed beef].

Are you actually profitable right now, given feed and other costs?

Yes, on the cattle side, for sure. Farming on the grain side is different. Over the last five years, our production costs on corn, wheat, and milo have gone up 50 percent or more. On cattle, input costs are up 30-plus percent over three years — but until recently, beef prices had outpaced input inflation. Prices have come down significantly in the last two months with the border reopening, so now the two are close to par.

So these are good times to be a cattleman, if not a grain farmer?

Correct. Cattle and beef production has been very profitable the last two to three years — record profitable.

What about fertilizer costs, especially with supply issues out of the Gulf?

For sure — a lot of fertilizer comes from petroleum byproducts, so that’s part of the equation. But it’s also controlled by a few multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations that are essentially monopolies. That’s another part of the equation that’s probably not talked about enough. Combined, it’s put a real squeeze on farmers.

How has drought affected your pasture this year?

It’s been terrible this summer — dry across the western U.S., especially the Northern High Plains. We just got a nice rain, which lifted our spirits for the whole week. But it’s incredibly spotty — you can go 20 miles in any direction and one place gets a big rain while another gets nothing. It’s not a blanket statement that it’s dry or wet; it looks like a damnation, pockets everywhere.

Does family-scale ranching still look sustainable long-term?

Like any business, you have to compete with input costs, and economies of scale come into play. If you’re staying stagnant, you’re not keeping up. Margins in agriculture are slim in a good year, nonexistent in an average year, and negative in a bad one — and there are just as many bad years as good ones. So you have to keep expanding to offset that, to get your units of production up.

What about farm bill payments and support programs meant to offset trade disruptions?

That’s a frustration for a lot of farmers. They’ve been arguing about a new farm bill for six or eight years. It’s been “in the ninth inning” for years now. There’s good in it, but I think it’s skewed toward bigger operators. Smaller farmers might get the same payment per acre, but their cost per production is so much higher because they don’t have the volume. It’s not fair in that regard.

On packer concentration, roughly 80 percent of the market is controlled by the big four processors.

That’s correct. What’s really alarming is that two of the big four are foreign-owned — Brazilians own or control JBS and National Beef. People say there’s competition because there are four packers, but they’re so spread out geographically that in many regions there’s virtually no competition — just one packer bidding on your cattle.

Speaking of consolidation — JBS is now moving to fully acquire Pilgrim’s Pride $PPC, the chicken processor.

To me, that’s super, super scary. They’re foreign-owned, so they essentially have endless money — the Brazilian government can just print more reals every day. And it’s not a hypothetical concern, either: The founders [and controlling shareholders], the Batista brothers, spent time in Brazilian prison in the last few years after being found out to be crooks. I think they tried to bribe hundreds of senators and politicians.

Does the new round of tariffs on Canada worry you?

Not really. Canada needs us a lot more than we need them. I’m all for free trade as long as it’s fair and both sides come out net winners. We’ve been on the losing end of some of these trade imbalances for decades.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week:

$TSN ( ▼ 2.12% )  $JBS ( ▼ 0.95% )  $PPC ( ▼ 0.58% )  $NKE ( ▼ 0.39% )  $ONON ( ▼ 0.96% )  $DECK ( ▼ 3.51% )  $NVDA ( ▲ 8.74% )  $MS ( ▲ 0.36% )  $META ( ▼ 0.88% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.4% )  $PSKY ( ▲ 0.56% )  $WBD ( ▲ 0.45% )  $WMT ( ▼ 1.64% )  $KSS ( ▲ 1.17% )  $MSFT ( ▲ 1.75% ) 

The Usual Suspects

• Nike runs out of Air: Michael Jordan ain’t what he used to be, and that’s giving Nike $NKE a kick in the gut. Shares are down 39% this year, as Jordan’s aura fades nearly a quarter-century after his 2003 final retirement (he’d quit playing twice before). One-time megamarket China has its own stars and brands, and newly chic sneaks like On Holding’s ON $ONON, and Deckers Outdoor’s $DECK Hoka are winning market share in the U.S. “A business built on being the cultural and innovation leader in its category is a much tougher hold once that edge dulls, and we’d rather own the disruptors than bet on a legacy leader clawing its way back,” David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told the Wall Street Journal. Shares in Nike are down 77% in the last five years.
• Nvidia’s got questions. And you thought the AI boom-bubble was about to burst! Despite a dearth of revenue for AI providers, and an empire of data centers under construction years before they’ll generate any profits, Nvidia $NVDA, the chipmaker whose silicon wafers fuel the boom, is doing very well, thank you. Shares rose 9% Thursday, after the company said it expected revenue to grow 70% in its 2028 fiscal year. Analysts polled by Factset had predicted a mere 45% rise. To ensure demand for its chips, and to fend off Chinese rivals, Nvidia has been financing many of its clients, and two weeks ago teamed up with some big Wall Street firms to provide $500 billion in financing to the data centers who are buying its chips. That’s about 10% of Nvidia’s $5trillion+ market cap, but it’s left Nvidia with some massive off-the-books liabilities, that could turn sharply south if demand for AI services flags. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress says it’s not “circular financing,” Nvidia’s just helping tech firms over the hump. “The equity returns on our invested capital will be excellent,” she said on a call with investors. Analysts at Morgan Stanley $MS call it “balance-sheet-as-a-service,” and rate Nvidia’s debt as “neutral,” meaning there’s no visible upside and add that it’s too early to buy. Investor Will Rhind, CEO of GraniteShares which manages $16 billion in assets, says Nvidia’s argument misses the point. “There’s not a lot of concern in the market anymore about demand for Nvidia’s chips,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “The bigger questions now are about the broader AI narrative.”
• Meta gets spanked (and richer): Can kids become un-addicated to social media? Meta $META says it will do what it can to help, and agreed to pay up to $18.7 billion to settle 48 states’ legal claims across the country this week. It will tune its tech to stop stealing kids attention spans, halting alerts for Facebook amd Instagram during school hours and overnight, and putting a two-hour time limit on its apps for users uner 18. Meta will hold back $5.3 billion in payments until TikTok and Alphabet’s $GOOGL YouTube put default one-hour time limits for kids on their apps and also pay $5.3 billion each. “The payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids,” said Florida’s AG, James Uthmeier, who says he’s looking forward to seeing Meta in court. Investors may have been expecting worse, because the settlement wiped away the uncertainty and sent Meta’s shares up 3.4% on the news, increasing the company’s market cap by about $35 billion, turning the cost of the settlement into a handsome profit for investors.
• Paramount pokes the bear. When details leaked last weekend of a secret Friday meeting between California AG Rob Bonta’s team and Paramount $PSKY over its planned merger with Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD, the AG said he won’t meet again until Paramount “engage[s] in a way that’s sincere.” Press reports say Bonta wants Paramount to keep the two studios separate to preserve jobs and production numbers, and to spin off some cable channels, possibly incluoding CNN. Paramount denies it leaked the info. Commenting on the kerfuffle, PR practitioner Dylan Jones said you need to be skilled at practicing the dark arts of leaking. “That’s why you need to be sure that your leak strategy has some plausible deniability built into it, and that you’re certain the upside is worth the possible downside if it all goes wrong. I won’t lie, I love the Machiavellian side of corporate communications,” he said.
• Spending stall: With inflation stuck at 3.7% in July, far off the Fed’s 2% target (even if the new Fed chair wants to change the way inflation is measured), U.S. consumers are getting nervous. As BBTW noted last week, more consumers are tapping into home equity and retirement savings to meet everyday costs. Commerce Dept data released this week shows consumer spending flat in July from June, after it rose 0.4% from May. That’s been hitting the bottom line of many retailers. “Consumers are shopping but they are being very value-conscious and very selective,” LSEG Consumer Research Director Jharonne Martis told my colleague, Justine Miller. While some retailers are still going strong, others are beginning to feel the pinch. Walmart $WMT reported its slowest sales growth in more than six years, with comparable store sales rising only 2.6% over last year. Shares fell 9% on the news. CFO John Rainey said $4-a-gallon gasoline is squeezing consumers. “There are choices that consumers are making,” he said on an earnings call. “Our customers are experiencing persistent financial pressures from inflation in their everyday expenses,” Kohl’s $KSS CEO Michael Bender told analysts on Wednesday. Second-quarter profits fell to $151 million, from $153 million a year earlier, while net sales slipped less than 1% to $3.32 billion.
• Only Cash: America’s favorite, er…fantasy website, OnlyFans, is such a massive cash machine that before he died of cancer in March, its closely held parent company Fenix had paid owner and founder Leo Radvinsky more than $700 million in cash dividends in the past year and a half. In the two years before that, he’d collected a total of nearly a $1 billion. Radvinsky died of cancer, and his widow, Yekaterina, now controls the firm. Only Fans counts on some 2.5 million so-called “creators” for its, er…content, sold to about 132 million active “fans.” Most surprisingly, the company has only about 47 employees.

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Tech Talk

• Gates’ window into AI: Fresh from his congressional grilling over Jeffrey Epstein, Microsoft $MSFT founder Bill Gates is ringing alarm bells about AI, warning that companies are rushing ahead without a plan for managing the massive disruption AI will bring. “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” Gates wrote in a 12-page letter on personal website on Wednesday. “I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.” He called for more education and taxes on AI tokens and bots to slow the rush and prepare the future. But how seriously will corporate America take his warning? BBTW spoke with Umesh Ramakrishnan, Co-Founder of global executive search firm Kingsley Gate and AI-boosted hiring platform Ignyte, who’s in front of C-suite execs on a near daily basis. We asked him: Are C-suite execs prepared for the AI tsunami? He said: “Corporate leaders fall into three camps right now: The skeptics, who look at every clunky AI demo and conclude this is another overhyped cycle; the ostriches, who know it’s real and are quietly hoping it stays someone else’s problem for another two years; and a small third camp that has actually looked at the slope of the curve and started reorganizing around it.” We asked: I’m guessing they all want to tell themselves they are the forward-thinking ones, just because they have an AI line in their budget. What’s the reality? He said: “Writing a check is not the same as reading the curve. The real tell is hiring. If you’re still backfilling the same entry-level layer you filled two years ago, you’re a skeptic. If you’ve quietly stopped backfilling it and haven’t said so out loud, even to yourself, you’re an ostrich. The [relatively few] leaders in the third camp are doing the harder thing. They’re breaking their own org chart down into tasks and asking which layers still need to exist, before the market answers that question for them. [Unfortunately], most leaders are not ready for that question yet.”

Trumplandia

• Blame Canada: Donald Trump is mad at Canada. After wildfire smoke from Canada drifted into the U.S. (where wildfires were also raging) last month, Trump threatened to put trade sanctions on Canada. Then he followed through. It’s not entirely clear why, but last weekend after Canada refused what it called unreasonable demands from the U.S. (including an end to putting French labels on U.S. goods sold in the bilingual country). Trump announced 50% tariffs on many Canadian goods. That violates the free trade agreement that’s in place, but it’s hard to know yet what ti means for U.S. consumers. John Ricco, the deputy director of policy analysis at the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan think tank, told the New York Times that the new tariffs would raise the average tariff rate on Canadian imports to about 7.6 percent, from roughly 5.3 percent. But some sectors are going to be hit hard. Automakers who got used to building cars across Canada the U.S. and Mexico will pay more, as will American car buyers. Lumber will go up, too. But perhaps most distressing of all, Canada has told the U.S. right where to put its tariffs. Expect the price of toilet to paper to rise by up to 50%. That’s because the U.S. imported $328 million worth of finished toilet paper directly from Canada in 2024. Trump renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” on Thursday prompting a deluge of Canadian jokes on Twitter about renaming Lake Michigan “after the Epstein Files.”
• Treasury and Fed on Collision Course Over Yields and Inflation: A policy rift between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is unsettling financial markets, as the two key economic stewards pursue conflicting strategies on bonds and inflation. Ahead of the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium, Bessent surprised Wall Street by announcing plans to “at least double” Treasury buybacks of long-term government debt. The maneuver aims to cap long-term borrowing costs following a 19-year peak in bond yields. But investors warn that suppressing yields juices the economy and undermines the Fed’s fight against inflation, which remains elevated at 3.7%. While Bessent seeks lower borrowing costs, Warsh is trying to let market forces determine yields without heavy-handed central bank forward guidance. Fixed income portfolio manager Scott Barnard told CNBC that the divergence has created the distinct impression that the Treasury and Fed are “pulling in opposite directions.” Meanwhile, Greg Peters, co-chief investment officer at PGIM Credit, criticized the Treasury’s market intervention as a “self-limiting, self-defeating strategy,” adding, “The markets are looking for something out of Warsh, but I am not sure what he’s supposed to do here.”