You’ve likely noticed that food costs continue to rise, including the cost of meat, especially beef.
It happens that I come from a long line of butchers. My paternal great-great-grandfather arrived in New York along with a huge pile of sons, including my own great-grandfather, and they quickly set up shop on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It was the family business, and I imagine it had been that way in Podhajce, Poland, for many generations prior. It skipped a generation because my grandfather declined to participate, but only one, because my father, his son, then decided that he wanted to raise steer on a small farm in northwest New Jersey, which is exactly what he did for the next forty-four years.
The farm was where I learned that a steer, technically speaking, is a male who has been surgically altered so as to be unable to inseminate heifers, or young females. Steer produce less testosterone, and have traditionally served as the primary source of beef in the industry. A cow is a female who nurses a calf. A bull is the calf’s father. Heifers grow the herd, and are bred by either bull or artificial insemination. Because a single bull is sufficient to inseminate an entire herd of heifers, most male calves are castrated and raised as steer for their meat.
In the beef industry, very few producers raise animals all the way from birth to slaughter. That kind of producer is fairly unique to small, local farms. Even my father didn’t do that. Otherwise, the different types of producers are generally separated by developmental stage and geographic location.
Cow/calf operations allow their cows to roam on range, during which time they carry and birth a calf. Once the calves reach 400-500 pounds, they are sold at spring and fall auctions, and shipped out further west. Cow/calf operations require a lot of land, but the land is populated with grass of only average quality. These operations work well for uneven land that is not sufficiently rich to grow crops, and are commonly found in southeastern Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Colorado, and Texas.
Once calves are weaned, they are purchased by backgrounder operations, which transition calves from grass to grain-based diets in confined areas. These operations are generally located on less expensive land in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, that is closer to feedlots and the corn belt in Iowa, Illinois, and North and South Dakota.
At this point, the calves are sorted by size and condition into large open-air pens. A truckload of calves, each weighing 750-850 pounds, will be easier to market to a finishing operation.
Animals confined in a finisher/feed lot are fed an easily digested mash- or pellet-based diet made from corn, soybeans, and molasses. This diet causes the steer to rapidly add fat until they are ready to be moved to major beef packing hubs near Sioux City (Iowa), Omaha (Nebraska), and Dodge City (Kansas).
The country’s beef inventory is currently at a nationwide low, and this will not change anytime soon. A cow carries a calf for nine months, and each new calf requires two years to finish. All things being equal, this means that the industry is at least two to three years—if not more—from any meaningful increase in inventory.
Initial reductions in the sizes of the large herds out west occurred as a result of drought, and this quickly lowered the numbers of calves. In order to meet the demand, calves sourced from eastern states quickly began to be shipped around the country, and the prices for these calves rose as aspected.
As demand increased, producers began to sell heifer calves as well, generating short term gains at the expense of long term stability. Heifer calves would previously have been kept for breeding, an investment in breeders’ own economic future. Predictably, as fewer heifers were bred, the supply of calves—both male and female—shrank further.
Prices have risen at every level. Even the costs of “cull” cows, sent for grinding, have more than doubled. Culling older cows became a temporary strategy for a quick paycheck.
Beef has typically had a large export market. But 2024 beef imports exceeded exports for the first time in a very long time. The beef entering the U.S. is a comparatively low-quality product typically used for ultra processed products like hot dogs and “lunch meats.”
Feedlot businessmen have begun keeping cattle longer and restricting supplies. Larger carcasses means more meat per carcass. Whereas a butcher could expect to obtain 750-800 pounds of finished product from a butchered animal, the average is now 900 pounds or more. The majority of the increase is attributable to fat, which means that processors need more lean beef to help offset the extra fat and create palatable product. To supply that lean meat, prices for bulls have risen to record highs.
With these complex intersecting factors, I expect that beef prices are not going to fall any time soon, if ever. We have borrowed from the future to pay for today, and the bill has come due.
This situation brings several thoughts to mind. First, there is a major benefit to buying local and protecting local “foodsheds.” Local systems overlap in a way that strengthens each one. The global system, in contrast, is ever so fragile. Overflow availability of selected commodities, such as soy, corn, and wheat comes at the expense of quality, food safety, and health. One way to insulate your community from some of that fragility is to buy directly from local farmers.
Finally, we can use our growing knowledge about food to explore more sustainable sources of protein. I’ve been working on this for a long time. Let’s keep at it together.