Over the past several months, I have been hearing via radio, television, internet and social media outlets a mixture of varying perspectives on U.S. beef production, who buys and consumes it. Sadly, many of these perspectives fall outside the boundaries of the data that we have, which we use to understand domestic beef production and how it’s used. Given all the noise around these varying perspectives, I thought it would be a good idea to go through the data we have and provide some insights.
To begin, let’s take a look at the September estimates for the end-of-year (Dec. 31, 2026) U.S. beef supply and use that are reported by the USDA (Table 1). The data are from the World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates report published on Sept. 11 by the USDA’s Office of the Chief Economist, which can be found at https://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/wasde0926.pdf.
The supply side of the data reflects estimates for three things: one, beginning stocks of 577 million pounds of beef that were carried over from 2025; two, total U.S. beef production of 24.9 billion pounds; and three, imports of roughly 6.3 billion pounds of beef products, which are mostly comprised of lean beef cuts (to be processed into hamburger) and already processed lean trim. These three sources combined provide for a grand total estimate of 31.8 billion pounds of beef available for U.S. consumption through the end of 2026. Out of the 25.5 billion pounds of beef produced (excluding imports), the USDA estimates that 2.3 billion pounds of beef (9.2%) will be exported to our international trade partners, and 565 million pounds of the U.S. beef supply is expected to be carried over for use in 2027 (about 1.8% of the U.S. beef supply).
Source : ndsu.edu