10/08/2025
Announcement on our 2025 Beef Share Option - While we planned to offer beef this year to our many clients who buy from us annually in the half or whole beef. Despite taking a year off pasture at the ranch following our fall 2024 and spring 2025 forage replanting. We have been working with some neighboring ranches who share our practices but do not have ranch direct to consumer pipelines to source our client beef for 2025. However, beef prices have gone bonkers!! Which has led to a massive widespread increased practice of ranches across the country making selling their beef cattle live on the hoof to the big midwest corporate packers, as the price is just too high to make as much economic sense sold locally.
In the spring of 2024 when we purchased our last herd of 8 weight steers (800 lb on avg castrated males best for beef production) from our local cow/calf producer of grass fed Angus/Hereford line cattle. They averaged about $1800 a head as yearlings wholesale, today that same steer is $3300-3800 wholesale, live on the hoof to the midwest packers, still needing at minimum another 6-8 months of finishing before butcher. The butcher gets $100 processing fee, the USDA another $100 and then $1 a pound hanging weight for butcher and boxing and packaging. For our steers finished at the ranch thats about $900 on avg per head. That means that the same steer, at last year's ranchers cost of $2700 wholesale before finishing inputs and livestock risk is $4400 this year! As you can see anyone who can add 1+1 can see that selling that steer to the meat packers for $3500 or more becomes very attractive. Who in their right mind wants to pay nearly $3000 for half a cow! That's nearly double what our customers paid for their beef just last year.
So what has this done to the local ranch direct beef market? Below you will see a snippet from a local ranch’s current pricing near us, who has a similar operation and produces a product very much like ours. On avg. in 2024 our whole beef share was $3200 and a half about $1600 on avg. This year this local producer similar to us is getting $5200 for a whole and $2610 for a half, based on the marketplace... they arent out of line either. They are a great producer simply aligning their pricing with the commodity today. That is however a more than 60% increase in price from our prices last year! Im just not on board with that yet. I hope it doesn't become the new norm, as it will price a lot of families out of the nutritional benefits of homegrown farm and ranch products.
Based on the current marketplace for ranch direct beef, we don't feel it the same value proposition for our clients, especially without our own herd on the ranch this fall while we re-establish pasture. Relationship sourcing our clients beef this year has proven to be a fruitless endeavor given the current market climate for beef. The national herd shortage is playing a huge roll in this effect as well. The commercial packers are desperate for beef and will buy at any price just to make good on contracts even at a loss.
I have included a chart as well below that might interest you. The chart displays the last 25 years of national avg. beef prices, on the hoof. As you’ll see, the same as I did beef prices have wildly increased, beyond what I believe to be reasonable.
To make local beef matters worse for us producers and ranch direct beef buyers like yourself in this part of the country. Our only local USDA butcher plant closed up shop a month ago. This was our ranch’s USDA plant, sadly after countless hours spent building that relationship and establishing our protocols with them. That has all been lost, unfortunately there isn’t another USDA processor in the Southwest USA within a reasonable travel distance from the ranch, although there is one in the planning stages to be built near soon.
For these reasons and the fact that the local beef stock has been decimated by the sale of steers out of the area due to pricing beyond sense. We wont be offering beef this year as planned, I hope this doesnt put a kink in your food stock plans. However we feel that until the value proposition of ranch direct beef is once again in alignment with reality, the value proposition of ranch direct beef has been greatly deminished. We will again revisit the prospect of beef production at the ranch spring of 2026 🙂
We wish you a wonderful fall and holiday season.
