Industry experts have been waiting for U.S. producers to begin growing the beef herd, currently sitting at the lowest numbers in recent history. Bill Halfman, an extension beef educator at the University of Wisconsin, said expansion isn’t happening yet.
“No, the prices are one thing. The other thing going on is that there’s been some evidence of places where they’re trying to get started, and then we’ll get weather problems in some parts of the country where there’s a fair amount of cow-calf, so they end up delaying their expansion again. It’s been slow, and even when we do start with any appreciable numbers, still, you know she’s not going to have her first calf, though she’s two, and then that calf wouldn’t be going to the packing plant for another 15–18 months after it’s born. So, the cattle cycle is a long time to get going. It can stick and slow down a lot faster or get smaller a lot faster than it can rebound.”
Can beef-dairy cross cattle fill some of the gap?
“Some folks talk about the beef-dairy crosses, and you know, they’re definitely a better carcass quality, and better performance than straight Holstein steers, but we only got so many dairy cows in the country, and so they’re not gonna be something that’s going to pick up a big piece of this gap at all. That’s a pretty static number.”
Producers thinking of crossing beef and dairy cattle need to keep some things in mind first.
“I know a lot of them are looking at only breeding the top part of the herd, as far as milk production and genetic potential for their future replacements, and some of them are hanging on to a cow for extra lactation and breeding her to a beef bull for the calf certainly can work. They’ve got to look at that. Then the bigger question becomes, do we own these animals all the way through, feed them out ourselves, and sell them as three-four-day-old calves? With the prices that the little calves are bringing, it’s going to be extremely difficult to sharpen the pencil enough for most folks to justify owning them longer than that.”