California Cattlemen’s Association Outlook on 2024

On the heels of a cold and rainy few month, my family’s cattle just finished calving last week. Which prompted me ask my annual question, “I wonder what this generation of calves are going to do for our herd.”

Let’s hear from CattleFax’s Patrick Linnell, here’s a snippet from a California Cattlemen’s Podcast episode.

“…to start off the conversation, just talking about where we're at in the cattle cycle. At the end of the day you can have all these outside factors that happen. But it really does come down to where we're at in the cattle cycle with numbers. And obviously, drought has been such a big issue for so many producers throughout the country…Improved in a lot of areas, but some parts of this country still struggling with that. So one of the things that we talked about is that we continue to see numbers tightening up here and should continue to tighten for the next few years because we really haven't seen that expansion start to take place yet at the cow calf level As far as enough heifer retention and dropping down the culling rate enough to really start to see numbers rebound. So, you know, just kind of that long tail of this cattle cycle suggests that we're still looking at several years of tighter numbers ahead, which in general should be favorable for prices.”