Is the U.S. cattle industry about to rebuild the herd? Industry experts are watching for signs that expansion is underway. Brittney Goodrich, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois, offers her thoughts on where the current cattle cycle is at.

“We’re at what I would say is the end of the previous cattle cycle, but potentially the beginning, or we’re almost at the rebuilding stage, or in the expansionary stage of a new cattle cycle. Producers have obviously been seeing record-setting prices over the last number of months. We’ve got the lowest cattle herd size since the 1960s. So, there’s not a lot of cattle out there, so that’s really driving those prices higher.”

There aren’t many signs of expansion yet.

We haven’t seen any expansion in the cattle herd at this time, and part of that again is because we’ve seen the drought monitor here in Illinois, and it looks a lot worse than it did two weeks ago. And so, the drought makes those input costs of keeping cattle really high, and so then it looks a lot better to sell those feeder calves off and not expand your herd size. But it is anticipated that eventually, producers will start increasing these herd sizes again, and we will start to see the start of a new cattle cycle that will be probably starting in 2026-ish.” 

A couple of key factors have pushed the inventory level to record lows.

“First of all, we’ve seen drought-like conditions for many years. There was also the 2012 drought, which affected things, and so, that can have a major impact. But then, also, we’ve had increases in efficiency, in production efficiency, so now we’re getting more beef per cow that we’re processing, and so that that processing can also play a role.”