Texas cattle supply down for 4th year, state’s lowest since 1968
Back-to-back summer droughts continue to haunt the American agriculture industry as crop and livestock producers attempt to recover from a few brutal years.
This harsh reality was emphasized when the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that the nation’s cattle inventory fell for its fourth consecutive year — dropping to the nation’s lowest supply since 1951.
Data show the nation’s cattle supply has steadily dropped since 1998 from about 110 million cattle head, despite a small bump in inventory between 2013 and 2018, to 87.2 million head this year. Although several factors contributed to this decline over the last few decades, in most recent years, extreme weather has been the primary culprit.
“It’s relatively flat, but it’s been on a downward trend for about 40 years,” said Darren Hudson, professor and Larry Combes Endowed Chair of Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech. “One reason is because per-capita meat consumption has dropped, but total meat consumption has not because population growth is outstripping the drop in per-capita consumption.”
Around the same time last year, the USDA issued a similar report — with the same year-over-year decline of 2% — after the monthslong drought in 2022 forced cattle raisers into early slaughter. In Texas, this was the biggest cattle slaughter in a decade as roughly 80,000 head of cattle were culled each week throughout that summer.
Now, the nation’s leading cattle state — with an inventory more than double that of the second-ranking state of Kansas — is seeing its lowest cattle inventory since 1968, dropping to 12 million head, and ultimately, contributing to the nation’s 8.1% inventory decline since 2019.
Although the climate has adversely affected the agricultural industry in recent years, Hudson said the initial downturn originated as a social issue when some consumers started avoiding red meat.
“I think there’s a number of things that have happened over time that let do the decline of per-capita use of red meat in favor of poultry,” Hudson said. “There was a long time, I feel from a scientific standpoint, that there was an assault on the healthiness of red meat. That shaped people’s perceptions for a long period of time.”
Consequently, there was a significant shift toward poultry, as many people believed it was better for their health while they also found that it was more economically feasible on a per-meal basis than red meat.
“It’s hard to disentangle: What was a true health effect or a perceived health effect? What was the cost of this and that?” Hudson added.
Hudson pointed out that despite a reduction in head count, cattle are gaining more weight, partially offsetting the reduction.
“When you look at cattle numbers, it’s a bit misleading from the standpoint that total pounds of beef isn’t dropping nearly as quickly as head (count) if that makes sense,” Hudson said.
Economically, the industry is still on an upturn with a 7% rise in revenue from 2022 to 2023, respectively increasing from $116 billion to $125 billion over the one-year period.