BARN TALK
The Unfiltered Voice of Rural America
Issue #024 · September 9, 2026
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Hey folks, Friday the President signed two orders aimed square at the four companies that buy most of the cattle in this country, and one makes it easier to kill meat in one state and sell it in the next. Wheat gave back fifty cents, crude ran up eight bucks, and every state now has an approved plan to string fiber that nobody has started.
In this issue
| Two orders aimed at the Big 4 and the 85 percent of fed cattle they buy |
| All 56 broadband plans approved and almost nothing in the ground yet |
| USDA wants satellites to fix crop numbers nobody believes anymore |
| Manufacturing added 16,000 jobs in its best month in three years |
| A hog packed in ice in the back of a Suzuki Swift |
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This Week's Episode
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THE PACKER PROBLEM FINALLY GOT PUT IN WRITING
USDA has 60 days to tell the President what it is actually enforcing under the Packers and Stockyards Act.
On Friday, September 4, the President signed two executive orders about how meat gets bought, killed and labeled in this country. The number is in the White House fact sheet. Forty years ago the four largest beef packers bought 36 percent of the steers and heifers sold in America. Today they buy 85 percent.
What the first order actually does
It tells USDA to make Packers and Stockyards enforcement a priority, add investigators, and work the antitrust side with Justice. The Secretary owes the President a report inside 60 days on what is being enforced and next year's plan. It also stands up a loan program for small and regional plants, Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers.
The part that matters at your scale
The same order widens the two programs that let state-inspected meat cross a state line, Cooperative Interstate Shipment and Talmadge-Aiken, and puts one office in charge of walking a small processor through federal licensing. The second order sends USDA and the Trade Representative to review their authority on country-of-origin labeling for beef. It does not bring labeling back, which Trump said himself takes Congress.
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From the Barn
Good. Now do it. Every administration since the eighties has said something about packer concentration and the number climbed anyway, so forgive us for reading the fine print. The 60-day report is where you learn whether anybody meant it. The interstate piece is the gift. A man with a state-inspected plant and a customer in the next state has been stuck thirty years.
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EVERY BROADBAND PLAN IS APPROVED AND ALMOST NOTHING IS BUILT
Illinois came through on August 25 as the last of 56 states and territories to get its broadband plan approved, closing the paperwork on $42.5 billion. The Daily Yonder went looking last week for what that means on the ground. In most places, the trenching has not started.
Michigan is out front and worth reading as the pace. The state has contracts signed with 17 of its 29 winning providers, covering 197,964 locations, $917 million federal against $558 million of provider money.
By the numbers
| $42.5 billion approved across all 56 states and territories. |
| Four-year deadlines on most of the first projects under contract. |
| More than $21 billion in non-deployment money nobody has agreed how to spend. |
The part nobody puts in a press release
Virginia pulled RiverStreet Networks off projects covering more than 30,000 rural customers over years of missed deadlines. That is a county that waited five years and now starts over. Money approved and fiber buried are two different events, and only one puts a signal on your kitchen table.
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From the Barn
We have watched this movie. A number gets announced, a governor stands next to a shaded map, and eight years later the fella at the end of your road still cannot hold a video call from his own kitchen table.
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This week's numbers
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Corn (Dec '26)
$5.36 3/4 /bu
Flat on the week
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Soybeans (Nov '26)
$13.09 3/4 /bu
▲ $0.21 3/4 on the week
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Chicago Wheat (Dec '26)
$7.34 /bu
▼ $0.50 on the week
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Live Cattle (Oct '26)
$212.95 /cwt
▲ $1.23 on the week
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Lean Hogs (Oct '26)
$82.30 /cwt
▲ $0.40 on the week
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Crude Oil (Oct '26)
$91.48 /bbl
▲ $8.08 on the week
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Tork's Picks
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Bitcoin
$81,240 USD
▲ $1,040 on the week
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Tyson (TSN)
$51.42 /share
▼ $3.98 on the week
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This isn't financial advice. I'm just a farmer with an opinion.
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Tork's Take
Wheat gave back fifty cents and that is the number to sit with, because December is what you price against if you have any left in the bin. Corn went nowhere, which after its run is not the worst outcome. Crude up eight dollars is your fall drying bill and next spring's nitrogen in one number, so book fuel before somebody in Hormuz books it for you. Tyson lost four bucks a share the same week those orders got signed.
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Every so often a man sits down in the barn and reframes something you have watched people do your whole life. Greg Gunthorp farms northeast Indiana, fourth generation, about 400 sows outdoors. In 1994 his dad told him the hog business was finished for the independent farmer.
His dad was mostly right, and Greg says so himself. By his count 40 outfits own 70 percent of the hogs in this country and fewer than 100 plants kill better than 99 percent of them. He went the other way anyway, borrowing money he did not have to get into processing, with a Purdue ag econ degree telling him the whole time it was a bad idea.
“I knew it was wrong, but I knew it was the only option, and I knew that I would kick myself in the ass someday if we didn't take the chance.” |
The first sale is the part I keep coming back to. A chef in Chicago told him to bring a pig the next week. Greg had no plant yet, so he found a processor to kill and chill one, set a stock tank in the back of his wife's Suzuki Swift, buried the hog in ice and drove into downtown Chicago for the first time in his life. The restaurant was Charlie Trotter's, rated the best in the world that same month.
He lost his equity in 1998 like a lot of people did, failed at processing once, then talked somebody into lending him a few hundred thousand more to build a plant on the farm. It is still there, USDA inspected, and his pork ships under his own name. Ask him whether easier paperwork fixes the market and he says absolutely not. He wants antitrust enforcement and honest labels underneath it.
If you have ever tried to get a small plant to take your animals, I want to hear how that went. Hit reply, I read every one.
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Four things that caught our eye
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USDA wants satellites to fix its own crop numbersSecretary Rollins laid out a data modernization plan at the Farm Progress Show on September 1, built on a pilot leaning on satellite imagery, crop models and machine learning alongside USDA's own surveys. Farmers and traders quit believing the numbers after the gap between the first and final 2025 corn acreage figures came in bigger than anyone had seen. Better satellites are welcome. They were never the problem. |
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| 02 |
Manufacturing just had its best month in three yearsThe payroll report out September 4 put August manufacturing employment up 16,000, the strongest month since 2023 and more than triple what was expected. The economy added 162,000 jobs overall and unemployment held at 4.1 percent. One month is one month, but a sector everybody wrote off keeps turning up in the plus column. |
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| 03 |
Michigan families are handing ground to land trustsInvestigate Midwest reported September 2 that Michigan farmland fell from about 9.8 million acres in 2017 to 9.5 million in 2022, with farmer-owned acres down 208,000. The ground runs about $6,800 an acre, up 7.8 percent in a year against a national average of 4.3 percent. More families are signing conservation easements to keep a developer off it for good. |
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| 04 |
USDA wants to scrap a 1987 rule on rural housingRural Development proposed on September 1 to rescind 7 CFR part 1924, the 1987 rule setting construction standards on USDA-financed housing. The department says state and local codes already cover it and the federal layer adds cost and delay. Comments close October 19. If you build or remodel on a USDA loan, that is your window. |
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Barn Talk Trivia
Think you know your stuff?
The American Welding Society figures the country has to fill roughly how many welding jobs every year through 2027?
| A. 25,000 |
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B. 90,000 |
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| C. 175,000 |
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D. 300,000 |
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Did You Know?
Agriculture accounts for about 80 percent of the water this country actually consumes, and upwards of 90 percent of it across many western states. Consumed means gone, evaporated off a field or built into the product, not pulled out and put back.
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Word of the Week
| PUNCH LIST |
The running list of everything still wrong at the end of a job. Trim that never got set, a door that binds, the spot the painter missed. A job is finished when the punch list is empty, not when it looks finished. |
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Back on our regular Wednesday. Most of what moved this week was Washington writing down a problem this business has lived with for thirty years, which counts for something even if writing is the easy part. Go get the crop out.
We'll see you in the barn.
Sawyer & Tork
Hosts, Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com
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Read online · © 2026 Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com · This week's episode: #EP216
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