08/22/2026
🇺🇸🐂 AMERICA'S CATTLE HERD IS AT A 75-YEAR LOW AND WE'RE MAKING THE PROBLEM WORSE
As a small cattle producer, I look at what's happening in the beef industry a little differently than I probably would have a few years ago.
At Dogwood Farms, we see firsthand what it takes to raise cattle.
Pasture. Water. Hay. Fencing. Equipment. Healthy soil. A lot of work.
And most importantly TIME.
That's why I think more Americans need to be paying attention to what's happening with the U.S. cattle herd.
America's cattle herd is near its lowest level in roughly 75 years.
Meanwhile, packing plants are closing or restructuring, cattle are becoming harder for processors to source, and consumers are still paying high prices for beef at the grocery store.
Those things are connected.
🐂 YOU CAN'T PROCESS CATTLE THAT DON'T EXIST.
We've built much of America's beef system around enormous processing facilities that need thousands of cattle moving through them every day.
That system works when there are enough cattle.
But what happens when there aren't?
We're finding out.
When cattle numbers shrink, processors struggle. And when a large plant closes or cuts production, the impact doesn't stop at the plant gate.
It affects the ranchers who sold cattle there.
The truckers who hauled them.
The refrigerated carriers hauling beef away.
The feed suppliers.
The local businesses.
And ultimately, the rural communities built around agriculture.
But there's something else people need to understand:
We can't just decide tomorrow that we need more cattle and have them next week.
If we decide at Dogwood Farms that we want to grow our herd, we have to retain heifers we could otherwise sell.
Then we have to feed them.
Provide pasture.
Maintain fence.
Get them through winter.
Breed them.
Wait through gestation.
Get a healthy calf on the ground.
Then raise that calf.
That's years, not months.
Washington can't pass a bill on Friday and make another million calves appear Monday morning.
💰 HIGH CATTLE PRICES DON'T NECESSARILY MEAN THE CATTLE INDUSTRY IS HEALTHY.
Yes, cattle prices are high.
But sometimes high prices are telling you something very simple:
There aren't enough cattle.
Rebuilding the herd requires producers to believe there's a reason to invest the money, land, labor and years necessary to do it.
That's where I think government policy can make the situation worse.
If Washington responds to high beef prices by trying to artificially push cattle prices lower or undercut American producers with cheaper imported beef, what incentive does that give farmers and ranchers to expand?
You can't tell American farmers:
"We need you to raise more cattle."
And then turn around and say:
"But if cattle prices get too high, we'll find a way to drive the price back down."
Those two ideas don't work together.
🍽️ WE ALSO NEED SOME PERSPECTIVE ABOUT WHAT AMERICANS SPEND ON FOOD.
Americans spend a smaller share of their consumer expenditures on food than consumers in other countries represented in international data.
That doesn't mean grocery prices aren't hurting families. They are. We all see it when we go to the store.
But we need perspective before deciding government intervention in the cattle market is the answer.
Affordable food shouldn't come at the expense of the farmer producing it.
And I think that's something that gets lost in the conversation about food prices.
Family farmers and ranchers aren't sitting at the top of the economic ladder. When you consider the investment required, the financial risk taken and the hours worked, farming can be an incredibly difficult way to make a living.
There isn't a 40-hour workweek when you're responsible for livestock.
Animals still need fed when it's below zero.
A calf doesn't care that it's 2:00 in the morning.
Fence doesn't wait until Monday to break.
Hay doesn't stop needing made because it's Sunday.
And chores don't disappear because you already worked a full day somewhere else.
For many family farmers and ranchers, that last part is especially important.
They work another job off the farm because the farm alone doesn't generate enough income to support their family.
Then they come home and start their second shift.
Feeding livestock.
Checking animals.
Fixing fence.
Maintaining equipment.
Making hay.
Managing pasture.
Doing the books.
Then getting up the next morning and doing it all over again.
It's long hours, significant financial risk and physically demanding work. Agriculture also remains one of the more dangerous occupations in America.
And yet these men and women are doing one of the most important jobs there is:
🇺🇸 They're feeding their neighbors.
That's something I think about differently now that we're raising cattle at Dogwood Farms.
When people talk about driving down the price of beef, there's a farmer or rancher on the other side of that price.
Someone bought or leased the land.
Someone built the fence.
Someone planted the pasture.
Someone put up the hay.
Someone checked that cow in the middle of the night.
Someone broke ice when it was 10 degrees outside.
Someone took the financial risk of keeping a replacement heifer today hoping she'd produce calves years down the road.
Cheap food isn't really cheap if the people producing it can't afford to keep producing it.
Because eventually the farmer quits.
The farm gets sold.
The pasture gets developed.
The local processor closes.
And once that infrastructure disappears, getting it back isn't easy.
🔎 SO HOW DID WE GET HERE?
I don't believe there's one convenient villain.
Drought played a role.
Feed and input costs mattered.
Land prices and operating costs mattered.
Herd liquidation mattered.
Animal-health issues mattered.
Disruptions to cattle imports mattered.
The normal cattle cycle matters.
Government agricultural policy matters.
Trade policy matters.
Environmental and land-use policy matters.
Processing concentration matters.
Property rights matter.
And free markets matter.
I'm not interested in starting with a political conclusion and then working backward until I find enough facts to support it.
Work the other direction.
Follow the cattle.
Follow the money.
Follow the processing capacity.
Follow the regulations.
Follow the imports.
Follow the farms and ranches that disappeared.
Follow the replacement heifers.
Then see where the evidence leads.
🚛 TRUCKING NEEDS TO PAY ATTENTION, TOO.
Transportation sits in the middle of this entire system.
When processing capacity consolidates into fewer locations, cattle don't magically follow without consequences.
Transportation patterns change.
Hauling distances change.
Established lanes disappear.
New lanes develop.
Livestock haulers feel it.
Refrigerated carriers feel it.
Feed haulers feel it.
And when the overall cattle population contracts, eventually there are fewer animals moving through portions of that transportation network.
Livestock hauling isn't disappearing.
But when American agriculture changes this dramatically, transportation changes with it.
🥩 THEN THERE'S THE CONSUMER.
Consumers haven't suddenly stopped eating beef.
Demand remains strong.
Yet cattle have become scarce and expensive enough that processors are under pressure while consumers continue seeing high beef prices at the grocery store.
Think about that equation:
The rancher sees historically strong cattle prices.
The consumer sees expensive beef.
Processors report losses.
Plants close.
Workers lose jobs.
And America has fewer cattle.
Something in the middle of that equation deserves a much closer look.
🌱 IF GOVERNMENT REALLY WANTS TO HELP, MAKE IT EASIER FOR FARMS LIKE OURS TO COMPETE.
At Dogwood Farms, we're trying to build a different model.
We're raising cattle regeneratively.
We're improving our soil.
We're rotationally grazing.
We're producing beef for families in our own community.
And we're working toward getting that beef as directly as possible from our pasture to your freezer.
But here's the frustrating part:
Sometimes raising the animal is easier than navigating all the rules required to sell it to the person down the road.
That's backwards.
Instead of trying to control the price of beef, government should be working to:
👉 Make it easier for farmers to sell directly to consumers.
👉 Expand local and independent processing capacity.
👉 Create practical pathways for safe on-farm processing.
👉 Get unnecessary regulations out of the way so small family farms can safely process their products and sell directly to the families who want to buy from them.
👉 Make it easier — not harder — for the next generation of farmers and ranchers to stay in agriculture.
Because I'd argue that one of the best ways to strengthen America's food supply isn't simply building another giant processing plant.
It's having thousands of family farms producing food for the communities around them.
More local farms.
More local processors.
More direct-to-consumer beef.
More competition.
More dollars staying in rural communities.
And fewer miles between the pasture and the dinner table.
⏳ THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN YESTERDAY.
You don't arrive at one of the smallest cattle herds in generations because something went wrong Tuesday afternoon.
This developed over years.
So we need to start asking some uncomfortable questions.
What happened to America's cow-calf operations?
How many producers left the business?
Why weren't more replacement heifers retained?
What role did drought play compared with economics?
How concentrated has beef processing become?
What happens to rural communities when processing consolidates?
How much farther must cattle travel?
Which government policies genuinely helped producers?
Which ones unintentionally made staying in agriculture or rebuilding a herd more difficult?
And perhaps most importantly:
What are we doing today to make sure we're not sitting here five years from now wondering why we didn't see the next crisis coming?
🇺🇸 FOOD INFRASTRUCTURE IS INFRASTRUCTURE.
We talk endlessly about highways, bridges, ports and power grids.
But farms, ranches, pastures, feedlots, processing plants, local butcher shops, refrigerated warehouses and the trucks connecting all of them form another critical infrastructure network.
It's the infrastructure that feeds us.
At Dogwood Farms, we're not trying to become one of the largest cattle operations in America.
We're trying to do something much simpler.
🌱 Take care of our land.
🐂 Take care of our animals.
🌾 Improve our soil.
🥩 Produce good beef.
🤝 Feed families in our community.
And leave the land better than we found it.
There should be thousands more farms doing exactly that.
Family farmers and ranchers don't need Washington manipulating the market in an attempt to make food artificially cheap.
They need a fair opportunity to make a living doing one of the most important jobs in this country:
Feeding their neighbors.
Government doesn't need to fix the price of beef.
Government needs to stop making it harder for American farmers to raise it, process it and sell it directly to the people who want to buy it.
Give family farms a fair marketplace.
Give consumers the freedom to know and buy from the people producing their food.
Strengthen local processing.
Strengthen rural communities.
Strengthen American agriculture.
🇺🇸🌱🐂 That's how you build a stronger American food system — from the pasture up.
