At CattleCon 2025, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays had the chance to catch up with the CEO of CattleFax, Randy Blach, and talk about the strengths and challenges of the beef industry today.
Coverage of CattleCon 2025 is powered by Farm Data Services of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
“There is so much opportunity,” Blach stated about the beef cattle industry today. “To see these kinds of profitability numbers in the industry, and hopefully, we will get adequate moisture throughout the year so we can keep a few more heifers, but expansion has been slow.”
His message to producers was that the strong prices seen today may only last a couple more years, and he predicts that the top of it will be seen by the end of 2025. Under the current profitability figures, he also sees producers begin to keep some heifers and cull fewer cows.
“I’m pretty confident that January 2025 is the low in the beef cow number,” Blach said.
To accommodate the rise in beef demand, larger carcass weights have jumped this year from a gradual five- or six-pound-per-head annual increase over the past few years to triple that number.
“It’s replaced a million head of cows with this increase in carcass weights,” Blach noted. “Ground beef is still over half of our markets, but even with bigger carcass weights, every carcass only has one ribeye and one loin, so it doesn’t solve all the issues out here of trying to give consumers more of the product they want day in and day out.”
Hays noted that fifteen or twenty years ago, consistency in quality was lacking, but seems to have found more uniformity today. “The data clearly tells us that,” Blach answered. “Beef demand is at a 37-year high and that doesn’t happen unless we are intentional with the decisions that are made through the industry. The industry has increased the choice and prime grade from about fifty percent in 2000 to eighty-four percent now. We’ve got eleven percent of the supply that are prime animals. This creates a higher quality eating experience and consumer demand reflects that is exactly what they wanted.”
The rise in beef demand has equated to $800 per head in added value for the cattleman.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
