Keep Green Acres Clowns Off The Board

Hooves on the Ballot

Ground beef is running close to seven dollars a pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The reason is simple. America is running out of cows. And the place where that problem meets your kitchen table, your property value, and your grandchildren's jobs is a school board runoff right here in Marion County, where two candidates, Brigitte Smith and Donald Barber, are running a cancel campaign.

I am going to explain how these two individuals, with their wildly intolerant cancel culture, are clueless when it comes to agriculture in Marion County, and why their backyard chicken and pigpen experience does not equate to understanding the business. This is a piece about one industry built on two animals, the cow and the horse, and about the children who will run it someday. It is about who should be in charge of those children's education.

Look at the national number first. The USDA's January cattle report counted eighty-six point two million head in this country. That is the smallest herd since 1951. Beef cows are the fewest since 1961. Last year's calf crop was the smallest since 1941.

Fewer cows. Higher hamburger. Same story.

Now bring it home. Florida has eight hundred seventy-two thousand beef cows, ninth in the nation, according to the University of Florida. Marion County is the Horse Capital of the World, with about seventy-five thousand horses, more than any county in America, per the American Horse Council Foundation. The USDA's 2022 Census counted about forty-one thousand head of cattle here too. Horses and cattle share the same pastures, the same hay fields, the same vets, the same feed stores, the same fence builders, and the same bankers. In this county, agriculture is not three industries. It is one.

And on November third, you pick the people who decide whether our schools keep producing the folks who run it.

Where It Started

Go back with me to 1521. Ponce de León came back to Florida that year with horses and seven Andalusian cattle, according to the University of South Florida's Florida history project. Seven cows. That is where American ranching began. Here. Not Texas.

Texas would prefer you not bring that up.

By 1700, the State Archives of Florida counts about thirty-four ranches and twenty thousand head of cattle in Florida. That was before there was a United States.

Now come closer to home. In 1941, Marion County started a steer show. In 1945, the county built the Southeastern Livestock Pavilion on Jacksonville Road, one of the first new arenas finished anywhere after the Second World War. The country had just come home from a war, and one of the first things this county built was a barn big enough for cattle and the children who raise them. That tells you what kind of people we were.

What Is Happening to the Herd

Cattle are not a factory. You cannot flip a switch and make more. A rancher has to hold back young heifers instead of selling them, breed them, wait for the calves, and raise those calves before a pound of hamburger ever reaches a store. The American Farm Bureau says the national herd probably will not truly grow again until at least 2028.

Cattle run on cow time, not campaign time.

In the meantime, the middle of the business is crowded. The USDA's Packers and Stockyards Division says four companies buy and slaughter about eighty-one percent of the nation's fed cattle. The biggest of them, JBS, is owned out of Brazil. A rancher selling calves sells into a market a handful of giants control.

So in August, President Trump moved to help families at the meat counter. He signed a proclamation letting an extra three hundred thousand metric tons of lean beef trimmings, the meat that gets ground into hamburger, come in at the lower tariff rate for ninety days, starting September first. He said plainly it was a short-term fix, and he was right to call it that. A Michigan State livestock economist told NPR the extra beef is about two percent of the American supply. The American Farm Bureau checked forty-one grocery stores afterward. Prices had not moved at thirty of them. The average drop was sixteen cents.

Sixteen cents.

That is the lesson, and it is a good one. Imports are a bridge. You cannot import your way out of a shortage of mother cows. The only lasting fix is more ranchers raising more cattle on American grass. And ranchers do not fall out of the sky. They start out as children at a steer show.

One Industry, Two Animals

Here is how it fits together in Marion County. The horse brings in the money. The USDA's 2022 Census says horse sales here were about one hundred forty million dollars that year, first in Florida and fourth in the country. The 2023 American Horse Council study puts the whole equine economy at four point three billion dollars a year, about twenty-two percent of everything this county produces. The World Equestrian Center opened in 2021 and brought the world to our door.

The cow holds the ground. Cattle sales were smaller, about fifteen million dollars, but the same census counted about one hundred thirty-four thousand acres of pasture in this county, close to half our farmland. Hay is our biggest crop by acreage. That hay feeds horses and cattle both. The grass a cow keeps green is the same grass that makes this horse country in the first place.

And the cattle are thinning out here just like they are nationally. The census counted about fifty-two thousand head in Marion County in 2017. Five years later, about forty-one thousand. Every pasture that goes under becomes a rooftop, and rooftops do not raise Thoroughbreds.

Lose the cattle, and the horse country goes with them.

The Green Acres Mistake

Now look at what some people think farming is.

If you were around in the late sixties, you remember Green Acres. A New York lawyer moves to the country because