Why Beef Prices Keep Climbing and What Could Actually Fix It

By Aran Brunette, volunteer at FACT

Grand View Beef Farm

A trip to the grocery store can bring serious sticker shock these days. Food prices have climbed sharply over the past few years, and beef has led the way. So what's actually driving these increases, and why do prices keep rising even as many of the underlying conditions for raising cattle haven't changed?

A Shrinking Herd

The single biggest factor behind rising beef prices is the size of the U.S. cattle herd itself. As of January 2026, USDA reported just 86.2 million head of cattle and calves nationwide - the smallest herd since 1951, a 75-year low. That decline has been building for six straight years, and it's the product of several forces compounding at once.

The most significant is drought. Multi-year dry conditions across the Great Plains, especially in Texas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, the heart of American cattle country, have limited grazing and shrunk the grass and hay supply ranchers depend on. Less forage means smaller herds and fewer calves. When ranchers can't afford to keep feeding animals through a drought, they're forced to cull early, including breeding cows that would otherwise produce next year's calf crop. That's a slower problem to fix than it sounds: a cow's gestation period is nine months, and a calf typically needs another 17 months or so before it's ready for slaughter. Even when the rain finally comes, herd rebuilding lags years behind it.

Rising input costs and consolidation in the meatpacking industry compound the squeeze. As fewer, larger processors control more of the supply chain, ranchers have less leverage over the prices they receive for cattle, even as their own costs climb.

Screwworm Adds a New Complication

Beef prices are also being squeezed by the return of the New World Screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite that lays its eggs in the open wounds of warm-blooded animals, where the larvae then burrow into living tissue. The U.S. and its neighbors spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars eradicating it through a coordinated sterile-fly release program. But screwworm cases have crept steadily northward through Central America and Mexico in recent years, and in 2026 the parasite was confirmed in a calf in South Texas, marking the first U.S. livestock detection in decades.

The USDA closed livestock trade at southern border ports in May 2025 and, after a brief attempt to reopen them, shut them down again on July 9, 2025, where they remain closed. Mexico had supplied roughly 62% of U.S. cattle imports in the years before the closure, so cutting off that supply has tightened the domestic market considerably,  arguably as much as the drought itself. For a deeper look at the biology and history of the parasite, FACT's Humane Farming Program Director, Samantha Gasson, has a blog that gets into all the nitty-gritty details.

Imports Help, But Only So Much

With the southern border closed to Mexican cattle, the U.S. has leaned more heavily on imports from other beef-producing countries, including Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina (Don’t get me started on the environmental implications of chopping down rainforest to graze cattle; that’s a whole other blog post). But shifting tariff policy has made that supply line volatile, too. Tariffs on imported beef, layered on top of already-tight global supply, mean the imports meant to ease pressure on U.S. prices often come at a premium of their own, a cost that, of course, gets passed straight to consumers.

Fewer Farmers, Fewer Ranchers

A quieter but persistent driver of rising beef prices is the aging and shrinking population of American farmers and ranchers. According to USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture, more than 40% of American farmers are 65 or older, and the average farmer is now over 58. As older ranchers retire and downsize their herds, there simply aren't enough younger farmers stepping in to replace them.

Part of the problem is the barrier to entry. Buying enough land to run even a small herd can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars before accounting for the time and expense of actually raising cattle. Many young and beginning farmers can't make that math work as a full-time living. In fact, most farmers work a second job to make ends meet. Those who have got into ranching in recent years often keep herds small, raise smaller ruminants instead, or farm just enough to feed their own family and community rather than pursue it as a full-fledged economic enterprise.

Why Pasture-Based Farming Matters Now

There's little any of us can do about rainfall patterns in the Great Plains, the volatility of global beef markets, or the spread of an invasive parasite. But there is something we can do about how resilient our food system is the next time drought, disease, or market shocks hit, and that starts with investing in independent, pasture-based farmers and ranchers.

Well-managed, pasture-based operations tend to build resilience into the land itself, in ways that matter most during a drought:

• Rest and recovery time. Rotating herds between paddocks gives grazed pasture time to regrow before it's grazed again, which builds deeper root systems and more resilient plant communities.

• Protective ground cover. Keeping pastures covered rather than grazed down to bare soil reduces evaporation, moderates soil temperature, and protects against erosion, all of which help forage survive longer into dry conditions.

• Diverse forage. A mix of grasses and legumes, rather than a single monoculture, spreads risk: different plants respond differently to heat and dry spells, so pastures stay productive even when one species struggles.

• Adaptive herd movement. Ranchers who can adjust where and how long animals graze in response to changing conditions avoid overgrazing stressed land, giving it a better chance to bounce back when rain does return.

Together, these practices improve the soil's ability to capture and hold water — deeper roots and higher organic matter mean rain that does fall soaks in rather than running off, and that moisture stays available to plants for longer. Research on rotational and regenerative grazing consistently shows exactly this: better water infiltration, lower runoff, and pastures that stay productive further into drought conditions than continuously grazed land.

That's not a small thing in a country where drought is now the single biggest driver of shrinking cattle herds. A resilient, distributed network of pasture-based farms doesn't just make for better beef or better animal welfare; it makes the entire supply chain more able to absorb the shocks, droughts, and disruptions that are becoming more frequent, not less. Supporting young and beginning farmers, and investing in the land management practices that help pastures weather hard years, is one of the most concrete things we can do to build a beef supply that also benefits rural communities, so that both can withstand what's coming next.