The Decibel - Why beef is so expensive right now

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Beef prices are currently around 23 per cent above their five-year average. And there’s no relief in sight.Kate Helmore is The Globe’s agriculture and food policy reporter. She explains what’s going on in the beef industry to cause these sky-high prices.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you shop for beef at the grocery store, it's not news to you that prices are high. The cost for beef varies depending on the cut and obviously where you buy it. But when we look at how much beef trades for globally, it's sitting around $10 per kilo. In 2023, it was under 7. Beef prices are 23% above their five-year average right now, and they're not expected to come down any time soon. So what's going on? Kate Hellmore is the Globe's agriculture and food policy reporter,

and she'll explain what's happening in the cattle industry that has led to such high prices. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is a decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Kate, thanks for coming back in the show. Thanks for having me. We've seen food prices rise, more or less across the board. So why did you want to focus on beef prices? When we look at food prices, we've seen that beef prices are kind of the leading culprit.

The beef prices have risen about five times more than the annual rate of inflation. But the other thing is an agricultural reporter. So I hear about this from the other side of the scale, which is from the ranchers themselves. And I've been reporting on beef for a few years now. And so this is kind of this moment we've all been waiting to happen. Okay, interesting. Yeah, to bring it back to the prices of inflation. So food prices I've been hovering around 3.4%. And then, like you said, beef specifically has seen a faster rate of inflation. It's about 5.5 times higher.

So it's quite a bit different from other food prices. It is. It really is. And if we look at food prices, there's lots of complex reasons why those are increasing. And a lot of them are similar, such as the increased cost of fuel or the increased cost of energy, those kinds of things. But beef is a very specific story. And it's a very specific cause behind it.

Okay. So let's get into what's going on. What's been happening? And why has it been so bad for people in the beef industry? There's a really good question. And we've kind of got to zoom back a little bit. I would say we'd take us back to about 2021. It was the first year of a really, really bad drought.

These droughts have been compared to like the dust bowls, the 1930s. So think of like, you know, your high school English class and your Steinbeck. That's kind of the level of dryness or the lack of precipitation that was facing the Western Plains. That's Canada and the U.S. Now, if you're a rancher, water is everything. So not just the rain, but also the snowpack, right? So the snowpack, it melts, the water trickles down to the streams, and that feeds the grasslands. And the grasslands is where you pasture your cows.

So, you know, as soon as winter's over, you send your cows out into that grassland, and they eat the grass. And that's how they feed themselves. If there's no water, then there's no grass, which means that your cows can't eat. And we saw that in 2021. and ranchers, like most farmers, cross their fingers and said next year will be better, and then it wasn't. 2022 was the same,

and then the year after that was just as bad. So we saw three years of back-to-back droughts. Ranchers might also have the other option is to feed their cows, hay, for example, and a lot of ranchers also grow their own hay, but again, drought also wipes out the crop. So we saw the hay crop was massively diminished, So in Alberta, which is the number one cattle kind of country in Canada, only 36% of the hay crop was in good condition in 2021. So many ranches were stuck in this position of not having enough grass to pasture raise their cattle, but then also not being able to feed the cattle hay because it was too expensive because they didn't have any of their own, but also because there was this hay shortage, they couldn't afford to buy the hay.

Right. Okay. So ranchers could not feed their cattle. What do they do? Well, then they sell the cows. Like if you can't afford to keep your factory running, then you shut it down. And so the option that ranchers had at this time was to take out loans, so to go into debt, which many of them did, to continue to feed their cows, or to make a phone call and have the truck come and pick up their cattle. So every year, ranchers sell a certain amount of cattle, and those cattle get sent to feedlots where they're fattened up with grains. and then they get sent on to slaughterhouses. What was really interesting about those three years, about 2021, 2021, 22, and 2, 2023, is that ranchers start having to sell something called their breeding stock.

That's their mother cows. Okay. So the mother cows is like the factory of the entire industry, right? If your mum cows, and every year they birth a calf, and then you fatten up the calf and you send the calf for slaughter, and the mum cow goes back and makes another calf the next year. They start having to sell the mums, which is when it's really bad because they're That's when your inventory starts getting low.

And that's when you lose the ability to rebuild it because the fundamentals of your entire business, you're just selling off. But you had to do that because you couldn't afford to feed them. Wow. And I imagine that if all these ranchers are selling cattle at the same time, does that affect the price of what they're selling at? That's the other heartbreak of it. I remember a few years ago reporting on this and speaking to ranchers who were saying, I have this mother cow who's like my favorite. You know, some of my favorites. She is so good at making calves.

She's a good cow. We've bred her genetics over generations specifically. I can't feed her. So I have to send her to slaughter. But I have to also do it for a fraction of the price that I would normally get. Because you have all of these cows entering the market at the same time, which is dropping prices. So they're taking these really, really low prices to sell inventory. They do not want to sell, but they have no choice because they can't afford to keep it.

Okay. So just to summarize here, so what you're saying is that three years of drought has made, feeding cattle too expensive. So ranches are having to sell their breeding cows, which as you've laid out are the foundation of these herds. Yes, exactly. Is three years of drought something a farmer can plan for? Like, I guess I'm wondering, is this normal? Okay, so the Canadian drought monitor during these droughts in 2021, the first one, classified the severity as an exceptional drought. That's a one in every 50 years, classification. Wow. And then we had two more years of it. So droughts, When it builds on top of other droughts as well, exacerbates the entire problem.

If the grassland is already dry and you don't get any more water, then it keeps on getting drier. But also, if there's less grassland and there's a lot of cows, and then you put the cows out to feed on the grass, they eat that down more and more. And if you don't get more rain the next year, then the grasses don't come back. And you do the same thing over and over again. In 2021, we didn't see as many ranchers take their cattle to market because they were holding out, hoping the next year will be better. But the impact that has is that the grasslands can't support that number of cows. So then it just makes it worse the next year. Okay.

Yeah. So it's compounding the problem every year. It compounds the problem. Yeah. So let's talk about present day. How have these challenges over the last few years affected beef prices today? Right. Okay.

So when all of this was happening back then, beef prices were pretty good for us. right? Because you've got, and by us, I mean a consumer, because you've got all these cows hitting the market, which is bad for ranchers, low prices, but good for consumers. Now what we see is because there's not that many cattle out there, we have a supply demand issue. We do not have enough supply, which has increased the prices that we're paying at the checkout. Okay. And there's something called the National Herd, right? There's something that we track here in Canada? Can you talk about that? Absolutely. So Statistics Canada tracks what we call the National Herd. They do it for dairy, but they also do it for beef.

And this isn't really coming as a surprise, this moment we're in right now with high beef prices. It's not a surprise to anyone in the industry. The national herd has been dropping for quite some time. So in 2005, it peaked at about 16.8 million cows across the country. And then by 2021, it was at 12.6 million. And today it's at 11.9 million. So how is that long-term downward trend impacting the price? So we can talk about kind of how a cow goes from being on pasture or the way maybe to your fridge.

The cow goes from the rancher to the feedlot. The feedlot is where they fatten them up. They pay the rancher. And then the feedlot fattens them up, sends them to a slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouse pays the feedlot. And then a slaughterhouse typically will slaughter and then process and package and now sell to the retailer. All of those costs get passed along. So the farmer suddenly has leverage because there's not that.

many cows, and they don't want to sell that much. Then the feedlots offering higher prices, then the slaughterhouse is offering higher prices, and then the retailer's offering higher prices try and get you to convince you to sell the cow, right? And ultimately, we have to pay high prices as a consumer. It's just like basic supply and demand. Let's talk about the consumer for a moment, because we're seeing high prices as a result of both the long-term trend of a shrinking national herd and a few difficult seasons because of the drought. So when someone goes to their butcher or say a steakhouse or a burger joint, does the price that they see reflect all of these things

or are consumers somehow being spared a bit? Consumers are paying more for beef at the retail level, but also like at the burger joint, for example. So I spoke to one burger joint and they've seen ground beef prices have increased 15% since about March. They're passing those costs along to their customers. But not all places can afford to do that.

So a burger joint can afford to do that because their burger is $10. And consumers are like, yeah, I can pay an extra 15%. That's fine, you know. But let's say you're a steakhouse and your stake is $100. That 15% is a big deal. And if you're a business owner, you're thinking to yourself, am I going to lose customers if I start doing this? If I start charging an extra 15% on this $100 steak, am I going to see customers walking out the door? And then fundamentally underneath it all, you also have the industry contending with losing what they call the center of the plate. So in protein, the protein industry has kind of come down to the big free, which is

beef, chicken, and pork. And what beef doesn't want to do is increased prices and therefore see consumers saying, you know what, I'm not going to go for that steak dinner on Fridays. I'm going to have pork chop because the pork is cheaper. And then suddenly they say, actually, you know what, I really like cooking pork. I figured out how to cook a really nice pork chop. And suddenly, even if your beef prices go back down, you've lost that consumer now to pork. So, there will be some massaging there, such as if we look at it on a macro level, we are seeing an increase in imports of beef from places like Argentina, the UK, New Zealand to try and kind keep those prices a little bit more stable. All of that said, consumer demand for beef is

surprisingly resilient. In fact, there's been a small increase in demand for beef of 0.7% on a per capita consumption. And I think it's a testament to kind of the power of beef. in our social diet, in our cultural diet, right? Like Canadians and Americans, especially when barbecue season comes around, we just want to throw a beef on a barbecue. So it sounds like even though the prices might be affecting what we're seeing in some restaurants, that people are still buying a lot of beef. They are. The question will be how much longer?

We'll be right back. So, Kate, another issue we hear about when it comes to the beef industry is around the consolidation of meat packing plants. In fact, this is something that the U.S. President Donald Trump talks about because high beef prices are an issue in America too. So can you remind us what is the issue with consolidation in this industry? Consolidation of meatpacking, beef packing especially, is a problem in the U.S. And it's also a problem in Canada.

Before we get into it, let's just pause because I just want to clarify something that there's two types of meat solar plants. There is provincially inspected and there's federally inspected. Your provincial plants are mostly like server community. They're like small scale abattoirs. The federal plants is kind of where it's all happening. They're the ones that are allowed to export. They're the ones that are allowed to interprovincially trade. So move like their meat and their live cattle across provincial borders.

They're the ones that they're also the only ones that retailers buy from. Like, your loblowers is not buying from a local abattoir. They're buying from federally inspected plants. So what is a consolidation? Four federally inspected plants slaughter more than 90% of the country's beef. That's four locations. And among those plants, the two big companies, there is Cargill and there's GPS. So Cargo has two plants, one in High River, Alberta.

And that plant alone processes or slaughters 4,500 head of food. cattle per day. And then they have another plant in Guelph, and that's about 1,500 head per day. Combined, just cargo combined, accounts with 55% of beef processing in Canada. Wow. Okay. So that's two companies for plants that do most of the slaughtering here in Canada. It does sound like consolidation can be a big issue for rangers and for the beef industry as a whole. Absolutely. And Trump says this is the cause of the high prices for consumers. Is there evidence to support that assertion? Look, there's no evidence to support that statement. Interesting. This industry has been incredibly consolidated for a very long time in the US and in Canada.

And across that time frame, we've seen beef prices go up and down like crazy. It's a commodity game, right? Like they go up, they go down based on supply, based on demand, based on climate, based on all these other factors. It's kind of like a story of Arkham's Razor, I think. The answer that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually the right one. If you hear hooves on a pavement, you don't think zebra, you think horse, right? It's more likely that this is just a matter of a low national herd that is a result of climate change than it is a matter of some nefarious plotting and price controlling by slaughterhouses. Not saying that's impossible, but it's unlikely.

Interesting, yeah, yeah. So consolidation is an issue, but in fact, at this very moment, it's actually the droughts that actually caused us to have these high prices. Yeah. One more thing on the supply side is part of the issue that Canadian cattle ranchers, are exporting a lot of their meats to other countries? Could that be part of it as well? Look, Canada's cattle industry is export-based. We do, over the last 10 years,

we've exported around 40% of the beef that's produced in this country. If you think about that, that makes sense. Look at the size of our country. Look at how much of our country is grassland. We're really, really good at raising cows, and we have a small population. So we actually produce more than we typically consume.

And in 2023, when prices were low, because we had this drought thing, Those exports hits highs of 45%. However, that's not really what's happening right now. In August of this year, we exported around 4% less than we did the same time last year. And we've actually seen a large drop in sales to certain markets, such as Japan, where we sold about 10% less. And Saudi Arabia, where we sold about 19% less, which makes sense. If we're paying high prices, that means our markets would also have to pay high prices.

and why would Japan pay a premium price for North American beef when it could source this beef from somewhere else? So what can be done about this then? What did experts tell you could be done to fix the issues around supply and hopefully bring prices down? Yeah, it's a really good question, and it's a hard answer. It always is. It always is. Ultimately, this is a story of supply and demand. Then we have to increase supply.

But rebuilding the national herd or convincing farmers to keep more of their gains. cattle to invest in more mum cows so they can make more baby cows so that we can have more beef. It's a hard argument to make, right? There's a couple of things going on right now. One is the climate is becoming more or more volatile. Droughts like this are going to become more and more common. So events like this are more likely to happen. The second thing as well is that the average age of a cattle rancher in this country is like 55 plus. It's like 60 years old, right? And the next generation aren't getting into it. We see this across agriculture, but young people don't want to be ranchers. It's not lucrative. It is a long, draining lifestyle. You will spend hours and

hours and hours on horseback, you know, riding around trying to find your cows, which sounds romantic, but try doing that for 14 hours every single day. It's also a very specific skill set, right? People were born knowing how to do this. And so it's really hard to gain entry. financially it's hard to get an entry because you have to buy the cow and right now when the prices of beef are this high no one can buy the cows and then also just the soft skills that are needed to learn how to do this and also just the logistics of building backup so I spoke to a cattle rancher that had 600 mother cows in 2019 and today they have 400 they sold 200 of them over these drought years right and so I said to him how much would it take to build backup up to the 600 and he said, okay, I would have to start selecting calves right now that I think could be breeding stock. Then I'd have to keep them, not sell them. It's very tempting to sell them because there's a lot of debt that he has to pay off to choose to keep them. Then I'd have to raise that baby cow into something that could breed. Then their first baby is a write-off. And then so

maybe the second year they start producing the kind of cows that you can then keep going. And then even then, it's genetics. You don't have that much control over actually who ends up being really good at having calves, right? So there's a certain amount of loss there that's just like you can't control. And this is all bearing in mind that there isn't another drought, the prices stay high, and the other cost of running a farm, such as the cost of fuel to run your, you know, tractors that your hay keeps on coming in good, the prices of hay are half decent. All these different factors would have to stay really good.

He said, if all that happened, it would take me seven years. Wow. Seven years to get back up to 600. Yeah, it sounds like that building back up these mom cows, even if the conditions were perfect, it's very, very complicated. Yeah. And you also have to have people that want to stay in the game. And increasingly, they don't because it's a rough gig. Is there anything the government can be doing here?

Yeah. If you wanted to convince a factory to open in Canada, you would create the right economic circumstances for it to be profitable. And that's what the farmers would like to see. So that might mean a boost in the insurance they can get, for example, should their inventory, you know, be hit by a climate disaster and therefore them not be able to sell at the prices they want. Or sometimes something we saw in the U.S. was there was a few freezers. There was a few droughts that actually just killed cattle. They weren't even slaughtered. They were just wiped out.

Do we have the kind of protections in place that farmers feel they're protected, that their business is deep. risked somewhat. To bring it back to the prices, the high prices right now, could importing more beef from other countries, could that help the issue? Yeah, absolutely. That would help and that is what we're doing. So if you look at imports, they've increased from January to July 2025. Imports were up 23% in volume, specifically from the EU and countries like the UK and New Zealand. That does help and it is also helping those prices somewhat right now. But bearing in mind that beef is a global commodity that's traded on global markets. So the price that is set in Chicago for beef is the price typically that happens across the board. And if the U.S.,

which is a mammoth of beef production, has a lower national herd because they're facing exactly the same problems as us, that means prices globally are going up. So sure, we can buffer this a little bit, but the prices we pay for British beef, for example, are still going to be higher because the commodity price is higher. Right, right. Okay. So just lastly here, Kate, you've laid out that the price is high. It's probably going to stay high for quite a bit of time just because billing off that herd is going to take a long time. You've talked about how difficult it has to be to be a rancher as well. And it really sounds like this industry has a lot of challenges. How sustainable is it? Yeah. Big question. It's a good question. I think it's

what everyone in the industry is asking himself. I think it's what the ranchers who are approaching 60 are asking themselves. I think that's what their children are asking when they're saying, do I want to take over this business? I think it can be made resilient. I think it can be made sustainable, but I think we have to have some really tough questions as a country about how we want to protect and think about our food systems. So, for example, is a consolidation of slaughterhouses, even if it's not part of the story about this beef prices right now, is that what a resilient food system looks like. What is the red tape and bureaucracy coming from Ottawa, for example, that's making

that a more difficult business? And for the consumers who are listening, maybe it's time to ask yourself whether paying that bottom dollar for a stake is actually what's best for this industry in the long term. There are a lot more direct-to-consumer kind of options these days. There is local abattoirs where you can go and those guys basically have a relationship with the rancher, they brought it straight from a rancher, they processed it, and then they're giving it to you. That means that more money goes to the farmer. There's less middlemen. There's less transportation, which by the way is better for animal welfare. But they're going to charge you a

premium, right? Because you don't have economies of scale operating there. But if we can kind of question this idea that we have, this thing that's the center of our plate, this protein that we all depend on, should be this price. And that's what we should get and start thinking about ways that we can directly support agricultural industry for consumer choices, then that could make a difference. Kate, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. That was Kate Hellmore, the Globe's Agriculture and Food Policy Reporter.

That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.