Farm Broadcaster Carey Martin from the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network had the chance to visit with the CEO of CattleFax, Randy Blach, at the 2025 Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Convention. Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is featuring comments from their conversation as they discussed beef market fundamentals and tight numbers in the U.S. beef cow herd.
“We are still in a historically small cattle herd situation,” Blach said. “It looks like we will see very slow rebuilding take place in 2025. I would expect that the nation’s beef cow herd might be a couple hundred thousand bigger by the time we get to 2026, but probably not more than that.”
Widespread drought is one of the major reasons that rebuilding will be so gradual. “Mother Nature still rules the roost in our industry, and we all have to remember that,” he said. “A lot of areas don’t have enough tank water for cattle, so they can’t run as many cattle. Other areas certainly don’t have enough feed, so when those things are all finally solved, we’ll see the cow herd respond.”
He expects profitability for cow calf producers to remain good throughout the next couple of years but anticipates a softening of prices by 2027 and decline from there for the predictable future – around 2030.
As far as feedyards go, things have been pretty good for the past few years, but as feeder cattle supplies constrict, they may be in the red in the near future.
“In most of the yards, there is so much competition for the available supply that most of the cattle that have been bought over the last three or four months have been $100 to $150 loser the day they are bought,” Blach detailed. “That is what we call buying them on the come. Most of the time, those things don’t work out very well.”
He added that the event is historically common at the topping phase of the cattle cycle when supplies are the tightest.
Packers, too, are going to see things tighten up. “There’s only so many cattle that we can harvest when we go through this kind of a downsizing,” Blach explained.
Although the industry’s harvest capacity has increased over the past three years or so, there aren’t as many cattle available to harvest. “It’s kind of the way the old cattle cycle works,” he said. “When you need more capacity, you don’t tend to have it, and when we don’t need it, we have too much. That is the phase of it we are going through for the packers right now.”
He emphasized the tightening margins for packers throughout this year and next and expects some packing plants to close down.
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.
