Comparing Apples to Oranges to Cow Size

As of January 1, the U.S. cattle herd was tallied at 86.7 million head, the lowest since 1951. Do we panic? Well…it is definitely something to consider – the herd size, not the induced panic – but there is something else at play. The beef supply hasn’t seen as steep of a drop off.

I had a chance recently to sit down with Dr. Rachel Endecott. She’s a rancher who served in academia as a beef cattle specialist for multiple years. While she says that we, as an industry, like to hang our hat on that “more beef” efficiency stat, there’s another piece at play…

“We probably say a lot that we’re just so much more efficient and we have way fewer cows and way more beef. But we never in that discussion say, ‘and the cows weight 300 pounds or 400 pounds more than they did.”

So if we’re comparing cattle numbers alone, it’s apples to oranges…

“One other way that I’ve looked at this is, let’s say we had a 300-cow outfit in 1975. We have this ranch. We run 300 head on it in 1975 and those cows weight 1100 pounds. Now we still run 300 cows on that same piece of ground. But, let’s say they weight 1400 now. Three-hundred 1400-pound cows is the same as about 382 1100-pound cows.”

Are you being honest with yourself about how much your cattle weigh? It matters when we’re talking upkeep. You can find a full discussion with Dr. Rachel Endecott here: https://ranchstewards.org/podcast/