Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is visiting with animal protein research analyst at Terrain, David Weaber, about herd rebuilding.
Like others, Weaber believes the U.S. cow herd is at the bottom as far as quantity is concerned but cautions that growth will likely happen very slowly. “If you look at the January Inventory Report, some mild growth – I won’t call it restocking or rebuilding, yet – was seen in Texas and Oklahoma. They were up a little more than a hundred thousand head combined. That is over six million beef cows between those two states.”
Even still, the total nationwide cattle numbers were down half a percent. States like Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Colorado experienced declines. In Texas, cow numbers increased by 60,000 head, but beef replacement heifers decreased by 60,000 head, indicating that there isn’t a strong push toward rebuilding yet.
Speculating on the cause, Weaber said, “If we look at what is going on in the country, I think there are a lot of ranches working on healing up balance sheets, trying to get their leverage position back in line after the last drought that we went through – we fed a lot more hay. Some of those ranches fed five years’ of hay in three years or three years’ in two. I would encourage folks that if you don’t have two years’ worth of hay in your stackyard, figure out a way to start working towards that.”
He warned of continuing La Niña conditions across the bottom third of the U.S., from California to the Carolinas.
He spoke of the increase in carcass weights this year over last year, citing greater pen capacity, fewer cattle, and greater demand for Prime and Choice grades of beef as catalysts for the additional days on feed.
Weaber said that producers decide whether or not to increase their herd sizes only once per year, and for most operations, that is in the fall. “Spring-born calves account for about 75 percent of the calf crop, and once those heifers leave the ranch, they don’t come back,” he said.
He noted the actions of producers last year in January and February, where they had designated a lot of heifers as retained, but as calf values escalated, they ultimately decided to sell them as feeders.
“There is kind of a relief valve there,” he added. “What it really does is it kicks the can in terms of the price cycle and the production cycle another year down the road. As we look at that calendar approach down the road to see when the break is coming, from a fundamental standpoint, it is still three or four years away.”
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