No, it means the monopoly exists at the meat processing step. Owning all the land for cattle raising was expensive, so investors targeted the processing step instead, fucking over both the ranchers and the consumers.

For ground meat, I've been going with pork, chicken, and turkey. You don't even have to drain them after browning usually (more so the poultry, though I've found ground pork is much leaner than beef, too). Price-wise they've all been creeping up and pork isn't that far behind beef (even saw a few times where the pork was the same price as the beef) but chicken/turkey are usually a few bucks cheaper per package.

Costco often sells Impossible Burger patties for a pretty decent price. Way better than grocery store prices.

Sucks when they stop selling it tho, so we tend to stock up on the things, usually have two 10 packs in the chest freezer

I wouldn’t tell you that Impossible Foods’ “Ground Beef From Plants” is exactly like real ground beef. But it’s pretty good. Unfortunately it’s not cheap, either.

This is all that I buy when I want something ground-beef-like for cooking. It's not cheap (not super-expensive either) but it's highly uniform and the taste and texture are fine with me. There used to be one or two other brands of plant-based "beef" at Winco but now there's only "Impossible" so I'm curious about what's going on in the artificial meat part of the market.