Last Friday, Donald Trump announced a plan to ease restrictions on imported beef, allowing 300,000 metric tons beyond the usual quota. In his Truth Social post, Trump claimed that this would both reduce costs for the consumer and allow American ranchers to rebuild their herds. But the scheme’s 90-day duration, which just covers the upcoming midterms, suggests an obvious political motive for its timing.

A central pledge of Trump’s re-election campaign was that he would bring down grocery prices “on day one”. It was always a hollow promise, given how little power the government has to decrease the price of most food items. But beef is a special case. Due to a combination of quotas and the idiosyncrasies of cattle, its supply is much less elastic than that of pork or chicken; longstanding regulations limit imports and, unlike other meats, there is no easy way to rapidly increase domestic beef production.

Quotas on the amount of beef imported from partner countries predate the current administration by decades. There are either no or very low duties on beef up to specified quantities and prohibitive taxes on every extra pound. When Trump says the 300,000 tons of beef will be imported with “no out-of-quota tariff”, this is what he is referring to. Given the volume involved, there is every reason to believe that the plan will succeed in at least somewhat reducing the prices consumers pay during election season.

But the way cattle are raised in the United States makes it unlikely that so brief an intervention will do anything to increase the supply of American beef. While the life of a chicken is measured in weeks and a pig in months, cows live for years. A single broiler hen or factory farm sow can have dozens of offspring annually but, except in the very rare case of twins, a beef cow can only have a single calf each year. If the calf is a heifer, it can either be retained to increase herd size or sold to a feedlot. In practice this means each farmer must choose whether to take a high price for a heifer today or save it in the hopes that its progeny will prove equally valuable in years to come. Low prices can force farmers to sell to cover costs, but high prices can encourage them to sell to lock in profits.

A consolidated industry might navigate such a situation with actuarial precision, but with cattle no such consolidation exists. Unlike pork and chicken, which are mostly vertically integrated from gestation or hatching through slaughter, beef cows overwhelmingly begin life on independently-owned farms and ranches. There are over 600,000 producers of beef cows in America. That’s more than 10 times the number of hog farms, and more than 20 times the number of farms producing broiler chickens. And while pig and chicken farms operate on an industrial scale as a rule, the majority of beef farms have fewer than 50 mother cows.

With live cattle prices reaching record highs earlier this year, many small farms are choosing to take the sure thing now rather than bet on the future. A three-month dip caused by a temporary easing of import rules is unlikely to change the math of a decision that takes years to play out.

When it comes to livestock, beef is the last bastion of the independent American farm, which explains why the plan to flood the market with foreign meat has received such immediate pushback. The small farmers who own beef cows like high prices, and the politicians who represent them know it. Republican senators and congressmen have criticized the announcement, publicly opposing Trump with unusual directness.

High beef prices, if allowed to persist for years to come, could eventually lead to an increase in domestic production. But the midterms are in less than three months. Angering a potent but small constituency overwhelmingly concentrated in deep-red areas would be a small price to pay for blunting the dissatisfaction of the voting public.