There is something backwards about this.

President Trump wants to bring down the price of ground beef by temporarily opening the door to as much as 300,000 metric tons of lower-priced imported beef over the next 90 days. REPEAT, Lower Priced Beef. He doesnt what to tell you where it is coming from.

The idea is simple: bring in cheaper foreign beef, increase supply and hopefully lower the price at the grocery store.

But here’s the question:

What happens to the American rancher?

American cattle producers have spent years dealing with drought, expensive feed, higher operating costs and a shrinking cattle herd. The U.S. cattle inventory is now around its lowest level in 75 years.

That shortage is one of the reasons beef costs so much.

So instead of helping American ranchers rebuild the herd and increase American production, we’re going to bring in hundreds of thousands of tons of cheaper foreign beef to compete with them?

That might make a hamburger a little cheaper in the short term.

But what does it do five years from now?

If American ranchers receive less for their cattle, there is less incentive and less money available to expand their herds. That could make the very supply problem we’re trying to solve even worse.

And American cattle producers aren’t exactly thrilled about the idea.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has come out against the plan, arguing that flooding the market with cheaper imported beef undermines American producers.

There’s another question nobody seems to have answered clearly yet:

Where exactly is 300,000 metric tons of discounted ground beef going to come from?

The United States already imports significant amounts of beef from Brazil, Australia, Canada, Mexico and New Zealand, along with countries including Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Australian, New Zealand or other imported beef. Some of it is excellent.

But consumers deserve to know where their beef was raised.

And American ranchers deserve to know why federal policy is encouraging cheaper foreign competition at precisely the moment they’re being told America needs more cattle.

Here on the Central Coast, agriculture isn’t an abstract economic statistic.

Drive through San Luis Obispo County and you see cattle country.

These are families, ranches, feed suppliers, equipment companies, veterinarians and generations of agricultural knowledge tied directly to the land.

If America has a beef shortage, maybe the long-term solution shouldn’t be figuring out how to buy more beef somewhere else.

Maybe we should be figuring out how to produce more of it here.

Lower grocery prices matter.

But so does keeping American agriculture alive.

What do you think? Would you rather pay a little more for American-raised beef, or is cheaper beef worth importing if it brings grocery prices down?