Barron's Streetwise - Where's the Beef?

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Steak prices are soaring. So why is the U.S. cattle herd the smallest in 75 years? Jack heads to Texas ranch land to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So right here, this is a black, white-faced cow. It's come in. Dollar bill, dollar two, dollar four, dollar six, dollar eight, dollar ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen. So one-thirty was bought by Ken 12x. So Ken is the buyer right over here. Hello and welcome to the Barron Streetwise podcast. The voice you just heard is Tim Niediken. He walked me through a Thursday cattle auction in central Texas.

Hill Country. It's the Jordan auction in San Saba. Jordan has another auction over in Mason, Texas. It's one of the biggest cattle sellers in the biggest cattle state. An auction like this Thursday 1 will go through about 1,100 head of cattle for over $2 million. That's one head at a time, 15 to 20 seconds each. Steak prices are up 55% in five years, and ground beef is up 69%. But the U.S. cattle her, just hit a 75-year low. The last time the U.S. herd was this size, America's population was half what it is today. So why aren't ranchers running more cattle?

I went to Texas to find out. Listening in, the prodigal son returns. Is that how you pronounce that? Jackson Cantrell. Good to see your smiling face. Isn't prodigal like I went away and lost all my money at a casino or something? It's something like that in a Bible. The opposite is the case with you.

You left me for garbage, literally, and you're doing very well with that. Now, we're going to talk about that down the row, maybe next week. You've been good enough to offer to fill in for us here temporarily for a few weeks to produce this podcast. Thank you. And I learned another fascinating detail about you already. It never ends. You wanted to call this episode, Where's the Beef? but I learned that you don't actually know where that phrase comes from.

Have I got that right? I have no clue. I just have heard it before and it feels like a boomer like thing that they'd say. That's like how about kids say six, seven or something? It's one of those things where a guy like me who hadn't thought for the last five minutes about how old I am suddenly realizes I'm pretty darn old. It comes from an iconic 1984 television commercial for Wendy's. It certainly is a big one.

It's a very big one. It starred then 81-year-old Clara Peller. Wendy's was highlighting how one of its competitors' beef patties look small on the bun. Hey, where's the beef? I don't think there's anybody back there. You want something better. Oh, my God, it still gets me. I feel like I'm already learning something.

Yeah. For example, they had television in 1984. Okay, so anyone who has taken a grade school economics class learned about the widgets. What happens when widget prices go up and what happens when they go down? How do customers respond? How to manufacturers respond? And one thing they learned is that when widget prices go up, manufacturers generally want to make more widgets. And that raises a sort of meaty mystery right now. Not just why are beef prices this high, but also if beef prices are so high,

why aren't ranchers growing the size of the herd? I'll tell you right now, you can look up and down the beef supply chain for answers, and you hear a lot of opinions. I heard many, many people say, well, it's the beef packing industry. That's only a few giant players, and they have to have something to do with making prices this high. I don't think that's what's happening now, and I'll explain why in a moment. The answers are found at the very beginning of the chain. with what I think is the most self-reliant worker in America, and that's the cowcalf rancher.

And they have to do with land prices and secession, and most of all, rain. I spoke with cowboys and Wall Street analysts and cattle marketers and buyers. I wrote along with six-generation ranchers and visited with restaurant owners. I also met with a Texas lawman whose group has been chasing cattle rustlers for a century and a half. He says business is up. Beef demand has been resilient, even with prices this high. Protein has enjoyed sort of a star turn among macronutrients. You might have seen that the U.S. government recently flipped its food pyramid illustration upside down.

Jackson, what's the term for that, an upside down pyramid from a geometry class? I think it's a food funnel. Okay, funnel. So the funnel now has a fat steak in a place of honor right, the top and bread has been banished to the bottom. Texas Roadhouse, that's a publicly traded company. Its shares have returned 95% over the past three years. They beat the S&P 500.

It and Longhorn Steakhouse, which is owned by Darden restaurants, have enjoyed faster growth than most casual dining chains since COVID. An analyst I spoke with Brian Vaccaro at Raymond James, he says, it's not just the value on the plate, it's also the value of the experience. Both of these companies have done a good job of it. Small restaurants are struggling more with beef costs. I visited the Barn Door in San Antonio.

It calls itself the oldest steakhouse in San Antonio. They have a 15-ounce rib-eye. They grill it over mesquite and charcoal. They listed it for $44.99. That's with sides. Owner Randy Stoke says it's a tough market and it has to be value-driven right now. Randy does his own marketing.

There's a saddle in the middle of the restaurant with a sign asking patrons not to sit on it. But Randy will hop on to make promo videos for social media. Here at the Barn Door restaurant, we use salt and pepper. If you're going to eat a piece of meat, you're doing it because of the flavor of the meat, not necessarily for the seasonings of it. The salt wakes up to me. He buys big cuts of beef and cuts his own steak to keep cost down. And he tries to be creative on pricing without couponing.

For example, waitresses there were recently pushing the surf and turks. special for $55. It's a smaller steak, 10 ounces. That's just big enough to order at medium rare, and you get four shrimp plus sides and a piece of homemade pie. Restaurants are not to blame for the high cost of beef. Something called screw worm is up to a point. These are parasitic fly larvae, and they burrow like corkscrews into warm-blooded animals. They feed on living flesh. There's an outbreak in Mexico that has halted cattle imports from there. That's typically 4 to 5% of the U.S. beef supply. Imports from elsewhere are up.

Brazil and Australia are key suppliers of beef cuts and ground beef, but not cattle, usually not high-end steak. What has made screw worm so inflationary is that U.S. cattle supply was so low to begin with. As of January, we had just over 86 million cattle and calves. It's down from a peak of $130 million. We hit that in the mid-1970s. Today's herd is the smallest since 1951. And we can move back from restaurants along key stops on the beef supply chain. You've got meat packers.

They slaughter and skin and break down animals into large sections called primal cuts. Beefpacking is an oligopoly. More than 80% is controlled by four players, Tyson Foods, Brazil's JBS, Cargill and National Beef. And they are often blamed for high prices, but if the packers are profiteering, they don't seem especially good at it now. Andrew Strelzik, he's an analyst for BMO capital markets.

He says beef packers are generally operating at around 70% of capacity, which is suboptimal. He tells me, it's hard for me to say that they are doing something to raise the price of beef to their own benefit when they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Tyson, for example, is expected to run a third year of beef losses this year. It recently announced the closure of a Nebraska plant.

But Strzik upgraded those shares to outperform in early January. He cites the reduced industry capacity, healthy chicken and pork profits, and a reasonable valuation. Early this month, UBS initiated coverage of JBS at Buy. That's a Brazilian company. It listed its shares in the U.S. last year. Whereas Tyson stock is 16 times earnings, JBS is only about eight times that reflects its higher beef exposure. UBS predicts a rising valuation over the next one to two years, followed by, quote, a cycle turning towards healthier margins on a longer horizon. So it could be a

weight for better beef profits. So packers aren't cashing in. What about feedlots? That's where weaned calves of six months to a year. In other words, calves that have been separated from their mothers and weighing 400 to 800 pounds, they're fed on grain for four to six. six months until they reach a slaughterweight of 1,200 to 1,400 pounds. Nebraska is the biggest state for feedlots. Some of them are owned by the Packers. But feedlots work off prices set at cattle auctions. Auctions charge a commission, the Jordan one will hear from in a moment, charges 3%.

But auctions too are beholden to a player at the beginning of the chain who decides supply. And that's the cowcalf rancher. Okay, let's get back to Tim at the auction house. Auctioneers talk so fast that I can't understand what they're saying. I asked Tim to do like Joe Buck does on football and just give me a play-by-play on the sale of one cow. That's what you heard at the top of this episode. That was in a small auditorium filled with mostly men wearing Western hats and dusty ball caps.

There were buyers there who supplied McDonald's and Wendy's as well as posh steakhouses. and they would just flicker a finger to bid, and they didn't learn the weight of the animal until after the auction had been won. They like it that way. It favors buyers with experienced eyes. Before going into the auditorium, Tim took me for a walk outside.

There were nine mounted cowboys whistling and yipping and moving pens of cattle into position for sale, and there was a catwalk above the holding pens for potential buyers to get a good look at the animals. These are everything in here, these are all cats. Okay, so weights from 150 pounds up to 900,000 pounds. Okay, so these are all basically animals that most of these will actually be going to feed yards. I asked Tim, who's making all the money with beef prices this high?

He said it's not the Packers. The ranchers are the biggest winners. So if that's the case, I asked them, why aren't they growing their herds? Here's Tim. So if you're a rancher, you have, let's say your average rancher in Texas has 30 head. All right, that used to be, let's call it a $50,000 year hobby. Okay? Today, that's a $100,000 year.

Barely significant capital outlay. At the beginning of this episode, when you heard Tim walk us through the auction of a cow, he called her a black, white face cow. That's another name for a breed called Black Baldi, and they're known for dark coats and stark white faces. Also, easy cowthing and attentive mothering. But Tim said it's going to go as a packer animal. In other words, that cow was being sold by the pound for slaughter.

Why? Well, it's possible that that cow was no longer breeding well, but it's just as likely that the high price of beef was too tempting for that rancher. And that gets to an issue called heifer retention. It's really at the heart of why beef prices are so high. A heifer is a young cow that has not yet had her first calf. she reaches breeding age at 14 to 15 months. Gestation is another nine months, almost the same for people.

At that point, a newborn calf, that would only sell for maybe around $150. But if you wait another six to eight months, when the calf is weaned and eating grass on its own, it can be sold as a feeder calf for maybe $1,500 to $2,500. Or the heifer could just be sold for beef straight away, without breeding. So the rancher who decides not to sell a heifer for beef today is making a multi-year bet, not only on prices, but as we'll hear in a moment, on rain. Let's drive west from Saba about an hour and a half to a place where the GPS stops working. It's hills and dust and brush, short trees that are all branches and no trunk. You can say this is the town of Fort McAvitt,

but that's not quite correct. There was a nearby fort of that name that was used to fight Comanche and to hold Civil War prisoners. The general William Tecumpsa Sherman once called it the prettiest little post in Texas. When a 16th Infantry Regiment left in 1883, settlers moved into the abandoned buildings

and they formed a town, but the last resident moved out in 1973. Dick and Carolyn Rungi are, you might say, townless. They have 84, 400 acres, nearly three quarters are owned, and the rest are least. There are six bulls, 185 cows down from a high of over 300. A good rule of thumb here is that each cow needs 24 acres. That's like 2.9 holes of golf or 700 to 1,000 jamba juices for anyone keeping track.

Thank you for putting that into context on the jamba scale. Most cow calf ranches are small. average is under 50 head. Carolyn has a law degree from the University of Mississippi, and she was honored by the Texas House of Representatives for her work on groundwater management. The family and I were riding in a Kawasaki off-roader, and Carolyn was explaining to me about Mesquite. Mesquite was not native here 200 years ago. In other words, it was brought in when they brought in cattle from South Texas. And so it's been invasive, and it's been invasive. And it's, It's really taken over.

We'll go down here and we'll see. Ranchers in this area uproot mesquite by dozer in an unceasing war. It serves them no useful purpose and they can't spare the water. Swaths of Texas have been immoderate to severe drought since 2020. Ranchers like to say they raise grass, not beef. To make a ranch profitable, cows really have to feed on prairie grass. Ranchers will give them supplemental pellets and liquid nutrients, the prices of those are shot higher. In fact, prices for all rancher inputs are up 55%

since 2020. The less rain there is, the less grass. In bad years like 2023 and 2024, ranchers have to buy hay and they lose money. Many will call their herds to cover costs. Some will sell half their herds to pay for feed for the rest. Last year brought a year's worth of rain in just a month and a half. That mostly just washed out the ranch roads. Today the land is dry again. With beef prices as high as they are, some ranchers

want to see more rain before rebuilding their herds. Carolyn says she has started to rebuild her herd. That gets back to heifer retention, holding on to young cows for breeding rather than selling them for beef. Nationally, heifer retention is picked up

only minimally. Brian Vicaro, the Raymond James analyst, He tracks the percentage of heifers on feed as a sort of leading indicator of heifer retention. A heifer on feed is probably being fattened for beef. Fewer on feed means more on grass. Those have likely been kept for breeding. Brian's latest reading is just under 39% of heifers on feet. That number has to go to the mid to low 30s to match historical heifer retention.

There's a conundrum here. To bring down beef prices, you need ranchers to hang on to more heifers for breeding. But in the short run, that means fewer sold for beef, so prices might have to rise before they fall. The rungies are older folks. Dick uses a wheelchair. Carolyn recently broke her leg. She was rammed by a 150-pound goat. Dick's daughter Lisa has been taking over management of the ranch. It's astonishing to see just how much work gets done by a lot. a family with no hired help.

There are fences to mend and windmills to fix. Each spring calves are rounded up for marking, as they say. They're vaccinated and branded. The males are castrated. That's the main difference between a bull for breeding and a steer for beef. It's meant to reduce aggression and promote weight gain. Some of the sites are jarring for the uninitiated. Jackson, do you want to describe rectal palpation for folks?

I don't know where I'd begin. I guess it's up to me then. Working individual animals is something that used to be done with a lasso and mounted cowboys. Today it can be done by a single person with maybe the help of a couple of herding dogs. You coax an animal into these narrow alleys with steel railings. Eventually it gets to what's called a squeeze shoot. That's a mechanism for keeping cattle in place. The Kawasaki we were riding in stopped at one of these squeeze shoots and a cow was sent in.

Dick's daughter helped him to the rear of the shoot. Dick has long experience in a ranch test for the presence and gestational age of a fetus. I'll just tell you that he stretched a latex glove up to his bicep, but his arm eventually disappeared to the shoulder. And he called out one third. That means the fetus had reached the end of its first trimester. Back at the ranch house, the conversation came around a land. There are well-to-do workers from San Antonio or Austin, or Dallas, he'll pay $2,000 or more per acre for tracks to use for deer hunting or hobby ranching.

There's an agricultural tax break that allows the Rungies to value their land at less than $50 an acre. Carolyn says, if we had to pay property taxes on the market value, we couldn't stay in business. I feel a little resentment about how they've loosened up the ag exemption stuff, because that's what's allowing people to come in and run up the prices of this life. land. There'll be land that, you know, they're paying $2,000 an acre for. And then they, the ag value of it is like $48 an acre. And so if we had to pay property taxes on the market value, we couldn't stay in business. The tax program has been relaxed to allow even hobbyists to benefit, and that's a common line of mockery here. And now you can do it with, you know, hummingbirds or something like that. I mean, it's really, uh.

The Rungi supplement their cattle income by raising goats and selling hunting leases. Some lucky ranches can sell oil rights. Even so, there's a sense that outsiders have bid land prices up to levels that don't make sense relative to the money to be made from ranching. Carolyn reckons her return on investment is around 1%. Dick's great-grandfather bought land here in the 1870s. Today, Carolyn says, if you're going to have a ranch, you have a ranch, you have a lot. have to either inherit it or marry it. There's so much work. I ask Carolyn, why do you still do it? You mentioned about the income you would pull off the property as a percentage of the value of the

property, market value of property. You mentioned that was love. That was small. But I mean, if you flip that ratio upside down, it's a tremendous value for the property relative to the money. Do you ever look at that and say, on a particularly hard day when a goat knocks in here or something, do you ever just, you know, look at that diet in the property and say... You know, some, you know, when a friend of ours who was a banker said, you know, why don't you sell the ranch? Then you could really live a lavish lifestyle. You know, it's worth millions of dollars. You can live a lavish lifestyle. And I said, but this is what we do. This is what we enjoy. This is the lifestyle we want.

Thank you, Dick and Carolyn and the whole family. Jackson, any questions so far? I'm just stuck on the image. Like, was that an exaggeration to the shoulder? You're going to go into sales of longer latex gloves. Is that where you're thinking? That's a great idea. I'll ruminate on that one.

No, no puns. No puns. Absolutely not. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to visit with one more ranch family and then hear from our Texas lawmen. steak around there's plenty of meat still left on this bone it's getting worse it's getting worse welcome back the next morning of my ranchland visit there were tiny pock marks dotting the dust it looked like rain

and sure enough the day would bring this sort of indecisive drizzle dora wright told me my daddy always said you'll take a rain and a baby calf any day dora's a sixth generation rancher her and her husband jim have a larger operation than the rungies. Just how many acres and head, they didn't say. But they took down their herd by 20% during a devastating drought in 2011, and they haven't yet built it back up. We were riding in Jim's Chevy 3,500. It was rattling over rocks and ruts. The interior was caked in dust and there were slashes on the dash where his dog normally sits. Jim told me, you don't want to buy a used pickup from me. The rights have found ways to manage their vast amount of work with just family and to keep their ranch intact after they're gone.

At one point, Jim stopped the truck and he sounded the horn for what seemed like no one and nothing. Off in the distance, a group of trotting cows appear. Back when Jim worked for Dora's father, he would rip feed bags open in the back of the truck, but now he presses a button and a machine dispenses pellets. Yes, it's a 20% protein grain cube. There's a They're getting the filler out there in the grass. This is a protein just so they can provide milk for the calf. These cows bulged from both sides. They were timing things to sell weaned calves in early summer.

Calf supply then is typically low and the bidding can be fierce. The rights planned to retain heifers this year for the first time in years, but the grass will decide. Bulls are a big investment, around $15,000 a piece. and the fact that you can buy a bull based upon its ability to throw a small calf, put that bull on your heifers, and that gives that young female a better chance of producing a live calf. Because if she messes up on the first time out, she's done.

You can't rebreed her and expect her to produce something. She's messed up. And so that is a thing that the industry has increased on, but it's also increased our prices. The rights track cowcalf pairs to make future decisions about culling. Jim says you might have a skinny little cow that has a great calf. She looks bad, but hey, we got to keep her. Dora is the record keeper, and she has a degree in computer science.

Jim says, I'm married to a computer guru. If I were doing all that with a number two pencil on a big chief tablet, it would not get done. Cattle can fend for themselves against coyotes, but goats cannot. That's a job of the right's imposing guardian dogs. They were imprinted on ghosts from the time they were pups. Farrell hogs are a bigger menace. Jim says you can clean your water trout just before dark. The next morning it'll have two inches of mud in it.

Half the time they break off the valve. But there are sport hunters who will shoot hogs from helicopters with AR-15 rifles, like one group from Mississippi. Jim says they killed 230-something head. it doesn't cost us as ranchers anything for predator control. These are all things that spread the work and keep costs down. But some ranches struggle to hold the land together. As ranches are passed down to airs,

they often get split into smaller and smaller tracts, many with absentee owners and little livestock. Jim says, it's all being purchased by oilmen and people from elsewhere, and the first thing they do is put up a high fence and a fancy gate. That high fence is significant. It's for holding stocked exotic game. But fences can fail.

There's something called Black Buck. It's a species of antelope native to India. It has multiplied in the area, and it competes with livestock for food. The rights, like the Rungies, have children who will carry on ranching. For example, Jim's daughter and her husband are both nuclear engineers. Jim says they worked in Minnesota for a while at a power plant and then thank the Lord decided to come back to 10. Texas. The family uses a limited partnership to keep the land intact and to give everyone a stake.

Come spring, the whole family participates in calf marking. Grandkids as young as 12 give vaccines. A small calf-sized squeeze shoot helps. Jim says, we've done the cowboy thing in the past. We've done the cowboy thing before. We've done like Taylor Sheridan. We hemmed them up in the corner up here and roped them and drug them out. But our horses are too old to do that anymore. I'm too old. to do that. I can't get down and get up. You heard Jim just there say we've done like Taylor Sheridan. That's a reference to the creator of

the television ranching drama Yellowstone. Dura says her favorite therapy is putting on an audiobook and dozing mesquite with a skidsteer machine. She says, that's worth more than a dollar bill coming into my bank account. When Dura was small,

ranchers encouraged their kids to leave for better pay with less toil. In her family, she says the pendulum is swinging back for now. She says, whether this will be viable when our grandkids have grandkids, I don't know. Thank you, Jim, and Dora, and the whole Wright family. We have one last stop. Jackson, before we get there, any impressions about ranch life?

Yeah, it just sounds really hard. And these folks have options. I mean, nuclear engineers, Dora has a computer science degree. I guess my question is, why do they stick? to cattle ranching. I think that's a question a lot of people have. If you do the math on the potential value of the land, it's a staggering sum. And I think there are a lot of wage earners who think themselves, why would you still be working so hard with your hands if you have access to that kind of money? Especially if these are educated and accomplished people with options. Why are other people

leaving professional jobs and going back to the ranch? One thing I heard time and again was it's more about the lifestyle than the money. I think there's also a strong sense of heritage. You know, the state of Texas acknowledges families that have continuously run ranches for more than 100 years. And that applies to both these families we're talking about. There are many cases of ranches where there were no heirs or the kids weren't interested, and the land was split up and today it's being used for different things. And that's definitely part of the answer about why the nation's cattle herd has been declining. I think for these families there's a strong sense of wanting to keep the land and the lifestyle intact. I hope that gives folks some answers about why their beef prices are so high, when prices might come down.

We can import more beef. We're already doing that, but we need to grow the size of the herd, and that can take years, and it's not as simple as just manufacturing more widgets. There are other, sometimes personal considerations that go into it. I want to make one last quick stop. You can consider this a post-script. It's not really about why the price of beef is so high or when it's coming down. Although it is about one more ranch scourge, it's not as prevalent as parasites or drought, but it has been attracted to high beef prices. Also, to smaller hobby ranches where cows are kept close to the road.

Before heading back to the city and the airport, I stopped at the county courthouse in Menard. It's a special job. It's not always the running gun and kick the doors in like, you know, you see on television. And there I met Special Ranger H.D. Britain. And I had a photographer with me. And the first thing he said was, if I had known you were taking pictures, I would have worn my good gun. In 1877, with livestock theft rampant, 40 cattlemen met about three hours south of here to cooperate. on protection. And their group today is called Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.

And H.D. is a regional supervisor in charge of West Texas. He says, you have to be a balance between a law enforcement officer and a cowboy. He's worked cattle his whole life. H.D. says most of his bad guys are cowboys. Some left the oil field to make more money and returned with high payments on new pickups, but they couldn't find ranch work. He says, Thieves are normally going to go back to what they know, and cowboys know livestock. Normally a calf's not going to be worth that much, but that cow is worth $4,000 now. So if you sell a cow and the calf together, there are $6,000 just like that. The thieves have figured out, I can go steal a load of cattle and make a huge check.

Unlike other stolen goods that are pawned at discounts, stolen cows can fetch full market value. H.D. says, a lot of times we call somebody and say, you stole some cattle and I know it. Meet me at the sheriff's office and they'll show up. You also have that one or two who will shoot at you occasionally. Livestock theft is up a bit, H.D. says. He also investigates stolen tractors and off-road vehicles,

burglarized deer camps. And there are financial crimes, like a $2 million case that involved a man who took out bank loans on cattle he didn't own. To keep watch for rustlers, H.D. scans the classified ads in the back of livestock weekly for ones that look suspicious. There's also an anonymous reward tip line called Operation Cow Thief. There is one source of information that has proven especially valuable. HD says, There's nothing better than a mad girlfriend because they'll turn you in right quick when you make them mad.

Thank you, H.D. Jackson, I feel like that's a good place to leave it for Valentine's Day. Fellas, if you're going to steal a cow, first of all, don't do it in West Texas. And second of all, keep your wife or your girlfriend happy. Box of chocolates, right? Some flowers. I can get behind that. I want to thank Tim at the Jordan auction and H.D. with the Cattle Raisers Association. Our Wall Street analyst, Brian at Raymond James, and Andrew at BMO Capital.

Go on and see Randy at the barn door if you're ever in San Antonio. Just stay off his saddle or at least make sure he's not looking. And most of all, I want to thank the Rungi family and the Wright family. I broke bread with both, by the way, Jackson. The brisket was delicious and I got to try my first chicken fried steak. It was a beefy trip, as you might imagine. Sounds delicious. Thank you all for listening.

Jackson Cantrell is our producer. You can subscribe to the podcast and Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen. If you listen on Apple, you can write us a review. If you have a question, you'd like played and answered on the podcast, you could send it in. It could be in a future episode. Just use the voice memo app and send it to jack. Dot How. That's H-O-U-G-H at Barrens.com.

See you next week.