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Trump Signs Executive Orders for Farmers and Ranchers, Sep. 4, 2026

September 4, 2026 · The White House · 0:50:22

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders at the White House on September 4, 2026, at a meeting with farmers and ranchers, with Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins at the table. The headline order, he announced, gives producers the right to bypass the large processing companies: “For the first time ever, we’re going to give farmers and ranchers the right to process their own food.” He described a program under which “small and medium-sized and large ranchers can sell their products directly to consumers so that they don’t have to go through the big four processes and middlemen,” with health and safety regulations streamlined while “very strong safety inspections” are kept.

The President framed the change against the state of the industry he said he inherited: “Our cattle herd fell to 86 million, the lowest level in 75 years. We’re building it up now.” Farmers and ranchers at the table spoke to both orders — praising the meat-processing change and, on the second order, the move to evaluate wolf protections where herds are threatened: “we ought to evaluate the wolves… if we’ve put them back in a state where they can maintain themselves we shouldn’t have them threatening our cattle herds.” The President thanked Secretary Rollins and American Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall, calling the package “the largest ever government effort to change all federal rules and regulations necessary to support our ranchers and our farmers.”

Why it matters

Agriculture is Secretary Brooke Rollins’s portfolio, and meat processing is where farm policy meets grocery prices directly. A direct-to-consumer processing right is a structural change the scoreboard can follow from order to implementation — who uses it, and what happens to prices and to the big processors’ share.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: two signed executive orders with a named mechanism (own-processing and direct sales) and a named baseline (an 86-million-head cattle herd). The scoreboard will check the program’s rollout and uptake against the claims made at the signing.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Signs Executive Orders, Sep. 4, 2026” (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the signing at the White House). Remarks as delivered at the event.