Beef Slaughter Capacity Utilization

By Charley Martinez and Chris Boyer

In recent months, there have been Southern Ag Today articles discussing the impacts of tight fed cattle supplies on prices, cattle on feed, slaughter weights, and total beef production (Anderson 2025a, Anderson 2025b, Maples 2025).

Each of the articles mentioned has highlighted the unique and historical differences between the current market and years past. One aspect that has not been covered, but is important, is slaughter capacity utilization (CU).

In Martinez et al. (2023), we show how we measure slaughter capacity utilization, which measures the ratio of operational cattle slaughter capacity over physical capacity. Figure 1 displays the monthly national federally inspected (FI) slaughter capacity utilization.