The USDA released the Cattle Inventory Report last week, which showed a slight decline in the overall cattle and calf inventory compared to last year. As of January 1, 2026, the U.S. beef cattle herd was at 86.2 million head, continuing a downward trend. Brad Kooima, a cattle industry analyst for Kooima, Kooima, and Varilek, talked about what jumped out at him last Friday.
“Revisions, where the USDA says we counted wrong, and so they revised last year, and even in this case, two years’ worth of numbers, like on the calf crop and things like that. You know, if I run through the main categories, all cattle at 100 percent was very close to the guess, 99.7 if you do the math. It’s almost right on. A total calf crop at 98 percent guess was a little higher than that. 99.3, that’s a little bit of a friendly number, and it’s a little more friendly the more I look at it.”
He talked about the cattle numbers.
“The cows, surprisingly, the beef cow herd was guessed to be around 100 or at par with last year. Actually, it comes in at 99, a bit of a surprise to me, so there it is. I was thinking that the dairy cow number was going to be bigger than expected, and it was. The guess was 101, it came at 102, so a one percent difference. Is that a big deal? No, of course not, not by itself. When you write through the beef replacement heifers, the average trade guess was 101.7, and we came in pretty close to that at 101. Dairy replacements, the guess was a little over 100, and it comes in at 100, so pretty close, right? And then the calves under 500 pounds is the last major category that’s probably worth spending a minute on. And the calves under 500 pounds, the guess was 99 percent of a year ago. It came in at 100 percent of a year ago. So, all by itself, all in all, you’d say nothing there that would tell you that feeder cattle had to be $5 lower today.”
Kooima talked about a couple of USDA revisions that stood out.
“They changed both the ‘24 calf crop, they lowered that by 113,000 cattle, ahey lowered the 2025 calf crop, though, by 521,000 cattle, so five days kill. Maybe that’s not a big deal, but I’m looking for little things, maybe. But now think about this. So, if the calf crop is 98 percent, which I said, now we’re 98 percent of a number that was quite a bit lower than what we thought. That 98 percent is actually a little more of a friendly number, had they not done the revisions, follow? I mean, that’s 1.6 percent they missed that calf crop by.”
He talked about a takeaway from the report that cattlemen might want to discuss this week at NCBA.
“How do we, together, get a handle on what’s really, truly happening on this beef-on-dairy and how it’s impacting the cattle on feed? It’s not just steers going on-feed, guys. It’s heifers going on-feed. It’s stuff that’s going on feed that’s going to be able to get dialed in and programmed to die 388 days later, or whatever it is. Why is Texas failing for confidentiality? They got 2.5 million cattle there, for goodness sake. They can trade a few cattle. I worry that we’re losing some ground on this price discovery issue that I care so much about.”