Rollins: Under Biden, ‘Cattle and Ranchers Were the Enemy,’ So She Canceled 900 DEI Trainings on Day One

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the Biden administration treated America’s cattle ranchers as a problem to be managed rather than an industry to be supported, and that the country’s shrunken beef herd is the result. In an interview with Breitbart’s Alex Marlow released September 17, Rollins said that under the previous administration, “cattle and ranchers were the enemy,” and that she canceled 900 DEI trainings on day one at the Department of Agriculture.

It was a blunt diagnosis of how the nation ended up with its smallest cattle herd in three-quarters of a century, and a claim that the decline has finally started to turn.

“They blamed cattle for climate change”

Rollins did not hedge. “Under the Biden team, you know, cattle and ranchers were the enemy. They blamed cattle for climate change, right? They wanted nothing to do with our cattle ranchers. They were closing up grazing,” she told Marlow.

She pointed in particular to Western ranching families who have run cattle on public land for generations. “A lot of our western state ranchers, their fifth, sixth, seventh generation, they have been leasing their land from the BLM, Department of Interior, or from us at the Forest Service through U.S. Department of Agriculture,” she said. “The Biden-Harris regime basically began to close all of that down.”

Grazing leases are not an abstraction in the West. Across much of the region, federal agencies manage vast stretches of rangeland, and a rancher who loses access to an allotment can lose the economics of the whole operation.

From farm agency to DEI agency

Rollins said the problem went beyond grazing policy to the department’s sense of its own mission. The Biden-Harris team, she said, “completely recalibrated USDA. Instead of being an agency that supported farming and ranching, it instead became an agency about diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

“I canceled 900 DEI trainings on day one,” she said. “It became about granting research to study the transgender, queer, you know, food justice farmer out of San Francisco, which obviously there isn’t such a thing.”

The 900 figure is Rollins’s own account of her first day in office.

The numbers behind the herd

The scale of the problem is not in dispute. The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service reported on January 30 that all cattle and calves in the United States as of January 1, 2026, totaled 86.2 million head, slightly below the 86.5 million a year earlier. The Texas Farm Bureau called it a 75-year low, and industry coverage reported it as the smallest national herd since 1951. Beef cows, at 27.6 million head, were down 1%.

Rollins also put a spotlight on the structure of the industry. “We have four packers that harvest 85% of the beef in America. Two of those are not even American-owned,” she said. “And that has really squeezed our ranchers for a really, really long time.”

That is the same concentration figure the administration put on the record in May, when the Justice Department and USDA announced an intensified antitrust investigation into the four giants: JBS, Cargill, Tyson Foods and National Beef. At that May news conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the four control roughly 85% of beef processing. Rollins said at the time that concentration had surged “from just 25% in 1977 to 71% by 1992, and now to an astonishing 85%,” and that about half of the major meatpackers are foreign-owned or have significant foreign ownership and control. The probe is examining possible collusion, price fixing and other anticompetitive conduct.

Is the herd turning around?

Rollins says it is starting to. “For the first time a month ago, we saw the heifer retention, meaning the ranchers are keeping more of their mama cows, go up for the first time in 10 years,” she said. “We see people leaning in.”

The latest federal data show early signs of rebuilding, though not a full recovery. USDA’s July 24 Cattle report put beef replacement heifers at 3.80 million head, up 3% from a year earlier, while beef cows were still down 1% and the 2026 calf crop was projected down 2%. The January report had already shown beef replacement heifers up 1%, at 4.71 million head.

Rebuilding a cattle herd takes years. A heifer kept back this season will not produce a calf for market for some time after that. But a rancher who holds back breeding stock instead of selling it is making a bet on the future, and that bet depends on believing Washington is no longer working against him.

“I think we are changing the fundamentals in such a way that for the long term, especially as Americans want more beef, the world wants more of American beef, we’re going to be able to meet that demand in a pretty significant way,” Rollins said.

Treat ranchers like the enemy and the herd shrinks; treat them like the backbone of American food and they start keeping their cows again.

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