By Lynsey McAnally
As producers, when we think about our place within the current cattle cycle, it can be difficult to distill the sea of information available to us down to something actionable. CattleFax CEO Randy Blach provided an overview of his team’s outlook Feb. 6, during the CattleFax Outlook Seminar, hosted as part of CattleCon 2025 in San Antonio, Texas.
Blach said tight supplies from a harvest standpoint are likely to worsen during the next few years. Just because supply is going to be at its tightest levels in 2026 and 2027, that doesn’t mean the bulk of the price increase won’t be experienced in 2025.
“I just want to remind you all that over the last 50 years, each of these cycle highs we’ve gone through has been lower [in terms of the national cow herd size],” Blach said before noting producers should not expect new highs during this cycle either. “We’re supplementing that supply, we’ve had record demand, and all those things are important to being able to keep enough high-quality supply out in front of our consumers so that we don’t force them to other proteins on a permanent basis.”
For a long period of time, Blach said, talk in the industry has revolved around not having enough consistent profitability for cow-calf producers.
“You can see we’ve got the best profitability that we’ve seen historically any time in the past in the cow-calf industry, but there’s still a tremendous amount of variability around these numbers,” he said, noting everyone has a different cost structure, lives in different regions and experiences different pressures. “[Between] the high-cost and low-cost producers in the industry, there’s several hundred dollars [difference], and that would be the case even within a state, not just across regions. But this is sending a signal, isn’t it? A signal that we should start to retain some heifers.”
Through the last few years, drought has been an issue across the country. Barring a deep drought that drags out for an extended period, we do have a recipe to see more aggressive expansion take place in the industry, according to Blach.
“You look at the number of cattle that we’re selling on grids and formulas, it’s increased substantially here over the last two decades,” he said, noting the industry has gone from about 30% of the cattle selling on some sort of value-based marketing agreement to about 65%. “Cash has declined. Negotiated grid cattle marketing has increased significantly. Why is this happening?”
He explained price signals have been transmitted back to markets between value-based marketings, premiums and branded beef programs. Those factors are instrumental in changing trends, and the resulting grid premiums are substantial.
A real shift has taken place from beef as a strictly commodity business back in the 1980s and 1990s at that time only 50% of cattle were grading Choice or Prime. Today the upper two-thirds of animals are Choice or Prime in our production systems, Blach stated.
“This is why we’re enjoying the demand growth that we’re experiencing in our industry. We’ll produce nearly as many Prime carcasses in 2025 as we do Select carcasses. Who would’ve thought it wasn’t that many years ago our industry was producing 2% Prime, while this last year we produced 11% Prime,” he said, suggesting it wasn’t that many years ago that up to half of consumer eating experiences were no good. “When they came back and voted with their wallet, we weren’t getting their votes, were we?”
To add perspective, Blach reiterated consumers expect high-quality beef day in and day out that is safe, nutritious and provides an enjoyable eating experience. While he says the industry has been able to deliver on that expectation for the most part, there is still room for improvement.
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