Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is continuing his conversation with senior animal protein research analyst David Weaber at Terrain about herd rebuilding. Part one of the discussion can be found here.
Simply due to the rising cost of doing business, Weaber feels that herd growth will be modest and intentional. “It takes a big pile of money,” he said. “In the 2010-2012 territory, if you were spending $1,700 or $1,800 on a bred heifer, you were spending plenty. Today, they are at least $1,000 higher than that. Carrying costs are another $1,000 higher than they were back then. The economic signal isn’t as big as maybe what we perceive, just because that cost and revenue relationship is not record large either, so that is a bit of a challenge.”
Weaber doesn’t expect to see any signs of expansion in the slaughter cattle sector before 2028. “We passed on expanding the cow herd this past fall, so we’ll have to wait until fall of ’25 before we retain heifers,” he detailed. “We breed those in the summer of ’26, they calve in 2027. It is a push to get anything in terms of fed cattle supply growth anytime, even in the back half of 2028, is the earliest you could get that done.”
Weaber said beef supplies will become tighter before then because the females will be removed from the supply chain when they are retained as future mama cows. Already tight beef supplies have resulted in a good “trade-in” value for cull cows, and once producers begin retaining heifers, they can expect higher prices on the animals that they do sell as demand will be extremely high as supplies are further tightened.
He advised producers to adhere to better risk management and planning practices as they move forward with cautious optimism. “There are more dollars at risk than we have ever had,” Weaber said. “So actively manage it. Don’t stick your head in the sand. Cost structure is of paramount importance. If you don’t understand your costs, you can’t run a risk management program. If you are a cow-calf producer and you don’t know your cost of production within $10 a hundred weight, I’m going to challenge you to go sharpen your pencil and… you can’t do anything risk management-wise unless you know what that cost is. We can’t forget about reproductive performance and its paramount mission on the ranch. If you can’t get cows bred, then none of the rest of it matters.”
He noted that many producers are still healing from the last drought as they are looking down the barrel at another drought period coming as mature cow sizes continue to escalate. “I would venture to guess that most ranches today need to produce forty or fifty percent more calories from their forage resource than they did twenty years ago, and none of them have reduced stocking levels forty percent,” he concluded. “We are asking more of the resource than we probably should be, and that isn’t a bad thing over the next three or four years if we have a fairly slow herd expansion to get some of this range healed up and in better shape. That would be okay as well.”
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