Maggots in a Calf. Beef Prices Next

A rancher in La Pryor, Texas walked out to check his herd last week. He found a 3-week-old calf with something wrong at its belly button. Maggots. Feeding on living flesh.

The USDA confirmed it yesterday. New World screwworm. First time in U.S. livestock in decades.

I can't stop thinking about this. And not because of the calf, though that's bad enough. It's what comes next. The thing that will land in your grocery cart in a few months.

Ground beef. Steak. Your burger on Sunday. All of it.

Here's what worries me. The screwworm fly lays eggs in any open wound on a warm-blooded animal. The larvae eat living tissue. Cattle die. Wildlife die. Pets can die. People, in rare cases, can die. It doesn't take much. A barbed wire scratch. A tick bite. The navel of a newborn calf. Anywhere a fly can land on broken skin.

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We beat this thing back in the 1960s. A scientist figured out something strange. The female screwworm fly only mates once in her whole life. Once. So if you flood an area with sterile males, the females mate with them, lay eggs that never hatch, and the population dies off.

It worked. We pushed the screwworm down through Mexico, through Central America, and built a wall of sterile flies at the Panama border. For 60 years it held.

Now it's broken through. The fly is back in Mexico. And as of this week, back in Texas.

So we need more sterile flies. A lot more.

Here's the part that keeps me up. There is exactly one factory in the world that makes these flies. One. It sits in Panama. It makes 117 million sterile flies a week.

We need 300 million.

I don't think most people realize how thin that margin is. The U.S. cattle industry. The grocery store beef counter. Your family budget. All of it depends on one building in another country making enough flies.

We're building our own factory. It's at the old Moore Air Base in Edinburg, Texas. It won't open until late 2027. That's 18 months from now. The screwworm is here today.

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Meanwhile our cattle herd is already on its knees. 86.2 million head. The lowest count since 1951. A 75-year low.

Drought wiped out pastures. Feed prices spiked. Ranchers sold off mama cows to pay bills. Once you sell a mama cow, you don't make a new calf next year. The damage takes years to undo.

Ranchers I know in Texas have been bracing for this. They check every animal twice a day. Eyes. Ears. Navels. Any wound. Any spot of blood. They spray fly repellent on cattle that just gave birth. It's expensive. It's exhausting. One missed wound can spread the fly to a whole herd.

On top of that, we've kept the Mexican border closed to most cattle for over a year. Imports are running at 62% of normal. Now with screwworm confirmed on our soil, that's not opening any time soon.

Cattle futures fell on the news. Tyson stock dropped. JBS dropped. Texas alone is staring at $1.8 billion in losses. Nationally, $10.6 billion. That's not a number on a screen. That's pasture sitting empty. That's ranchers who quit. That's the price tag at the meat counter going up. Again.

I get it. Most of us aren't ranchers. We're not thinking about a calf in Zavala County. We're thinking about dinner. Soccer practice. The mortgage. But this lands in your kitchen. Beef has already gone up a lot in the past two years. Ground beef is sitting near record highs. This pushes it further.

And here's the part I find hardest to swallow. We knew this could happen. The Panama line had been weakening for two years. Cases popped up in Costa Rica. Then Nicaragua. Then Mexico. The warning lights were on.

But the only American sterile fly factory we have under construction won't be ready in time. We let our defense run on one plant in someone else's country. We trusted a wall we didn't build.

Nobody knows how bad this gets. The USDA says it's one calf. Maybe they catch it fast. Maybe sterile flies from Panama keep it contained. Maybe.

But 117 million flies a week was barely enough before. Now the fly is here.

I keep picturing that calf in La Pryor. Three weeks old. A rancher standing there in the dust, looking at something he thought was gone forever. And behind him, an empty pasture where millions of missing cows should be. And behind that, a factory in Panama that's already running flat out.

This is what happens when you outsource the things that protect you. You save a little money. You sleep fine for years. Then one morning you wake up and the wall is gone.

More on this tomorrow.

— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger