Part One — Kill rates are not consumption
Everybody in this business watches the kill.
It's the first number on the screen Monday morning and the last one you think about Friday night. Head count moves the cutout, the cutout moves your margin, and after twenty years you develop a reflex: fewer cattle means less beef, less beef means the consumer eats something else.
That reflex is wrong right now, and it has been wrong for about two years.
Start with the ten-year frame. In 2016, packers ran 30,578,200 head of cattle through commercial plants and produced 25.221 billion pounds of beef. In 2025, we ran 29,795,300 head — 782,900 fewer animals — and produced 26.002 billion pounds. That is 3.1% more beef out of 2.6% fewer cattle.¹
USDA's August 2026 forecast puts commercial beef production at 24.967 billion pounds.² That is about one percent below what the industry produced in 2016, on a cow herd that has been liquidating for most of the decade in between.
So the herd shrank. The kill shrank. And the pounds didn't.
That is the first thing worth sitting with. The second is what happened on the other end of the chain.
The plate didn't move either
Here is the domestic availability picture, per person, retail weight — 2025 against the 2026 forecast:³
Beef — 59.2 to 58.9, down 0.3 Pork — 49.3 to 49.5, up 0.2 Broilers — 102.9 to 106.8, up 3.9 Total red meat and poultry — 227.3 to 231.8, up 4.5
Read the beef line first. Domestic beef production is forecast to fall 1.04 billion pounds this year — down 4%. Per capita availability gives up three tenths of a pound.
That is the number people will quote. It is the wrong number to quote.
Per capita is a ratio, and the population underneath it keeps growing. Look at the total pounds instead. Domestic beef use goes from 28.91 billion pounds to 28.85 billion — down 59 million pounds, or two tenths of one percent.
Production down 4%. Total beef eaten down 0.2%. Production fell twenty times faster than consumption, with the retail counter at $9.64 a pound for all-fresh beef.
Now read the rest of those numbers, because that's where it gets interesting.
Total meat availability is up 4.5 pounds per person, and 3.9 of those pounds are chicken. Eighty-seven percent of all the growth in American meat consumption this year is a single protein, and it isn't beef.
Think about what that means as a competitive setup. This year the consumer walks into the meat case and finds almost four additional pounds of chicken per person sitting there — and finds it cheaper. Chicken retail prices ran 2.7% below year-ago in July, the largest decline since 2016. Pork was up half a percent. Beef was up 9.4%, the first month under double digits after an eighteen-month run.⁵
More chicken. Cheaper chicken. Flat pork. Record beef.
If beef demand were going to break, it would have broken under those conditions. Every substitution incentive the textbook describes was present at the same time, in the same case, in front of the same shopper.
Beef raised its price nearly ten percent while its alternatives discounted to buy volume — and gave up two tenths of one percent of the pounds.
Two questions, and they're different questions
That leaves two things to explain, and they are separate problems with separate answers.
Where did the pounds come from? The kill is down. Production is roughly flat. Somebody made up the difference.
Why didn't the consumer leave? They didn't — they paid up while chicken went on sale — and the answer to where they went runs from the retail case all the way back to a boat.
The first one is arithmetic. The second one is worth arguing about.
Part Two — Where the pounds came from
There are only two candidates. The carcass got heavier, or the beef came from somewhere else.
The answer is both, in a ratio that has real consequences for how you buy lean.
The carcass
Over the ten-year window, average federally inspected dressed weights moved like this, 2016 to 2025:¹
All cattle — 829 lb to 878 lb, up 49 Steers — 891 lb to 955 lb, up 64 Heifers — 822 lb to 871 lb, up 49 Cows — 643 lb to 658 lb, up 15
Sixty-four pounds on a steer carcass, across a decade. Call it 7%.
Then 2026 arrived and broke the trend line.⁶
March 2025 to March 2026:
All cattle — 872 lb to 902 lb Steers — 947 lb to 984 lb Heifers — 871 lb to 900 lb
March average live weight came in at 1,471 pounds, up 45 pounds in a single year. Weights normally ease into a summer low and they didn't — first quarter 2026 averaged 898 pounds against 874 the year before, with steers at 984 both in March and across the quarter.
By the third week of July, all-cattle dressed weight was still running 886 pounds and steers 965.⁷
Here is what that does to the arithmetic. In the first quarter of 2026, federally inspected cattle slaughter fell 8.5% — 6,753,900 head against 7,384,800. Commercial beef production fell only 6%.⁶
That two-and-a-half-point gap is the entire weight story, stated in two government numbers with nothing in between.
Feedlots are behaving accordingly. On July 1, cattle on feed totaled 11.4 million head, up 2% year over year, including 7.12 million steers.⁸ With feeding margins where they've been, nobody is in a hurry to market light.
I'd add an operator's caution here that doesn't show up in the data. Weight is not a free offset. A 984-pound steer carcass does not scale a ribeye proportionally — it redistributes weight across the primals, it moves box weights out of spec, and at some point it starts pulling on grading performance and inviting carcass weight discounts. Everyone models the pounds. Almost nobody models what those pounds do to the cutout mix or to what a 600-to-900 box actually contains when the average carcass is a hundred pounds heavier than the spec was written for.
Weight bought the industry time. It did not buy it for free.
The rest of it
Weight explains part of the gap. Imports explain more.
USDA forecasts 2026 beef imports at 6.132 billion pounds, up 13.8% from 5.388 billion in 2025 — raised again in August, on what USDA describes as continued strength in domestic beef demand and available supply in Oceania. Exports go the other way — 2.333 billion pounds, down roughly 10%.²
Run it as net trade and the picture gets stark:
Beef production, 2025 to 2026: down 1,036 million pounds
Net imports, 2025 to 2026: up 990 million pounds
Imports are not filling a gap at the margin. They are covering 96% of the entire domestic production decline. That is the answer to the consumption question in Part One — the reason total beef eaten in this country falls two tenths of one percent while production falls four.
Where it's coming from has shifted too. By origin, January through May:²
Brazil — 666.0 to 620.7 million lb, down 7% Australia — 499.6 to 559.8, up 12% Canada — 396.2 to 412.2, up 4% Mexico — 256.5 to 326.9, up 27% New Zealand — 293.9 to 283.3, down 4% Rest of world — 393.4 to 551.7, up 40% Total — 2,505.7 to 2,754.6, up 10%
Brazil is down. Everything else is up, and "rest of world" is up 40%. Argentina alone hit 38 million pounds in May, roughly triple its year-ago volume, and now sits as the eighth-largest supplier into this market.
That 40% line is the one I'd watch. The lean book is diversifying away from its traditional origins faster than most procurement teams have updated their supplier maps.
Why it has to be imports
The reason imports are doing this work rather than domestic supply comes down to cows.
Federally inspected cow slaughter fell from 5,428,200 head in 2016 to 4,992,500 in 2025.¹ In the first quarter of 2026 it kept going — beef cow slaughter dropped 18% year over year, to 501,800 head from 611,800.⁶
Anyone who has balanced a grind formula knows what that means. A fed steer yields roughly 100 pounds of 50s — everything else on that carcass earns more as a cut than it does in a chub. A cull cow goes almost entirely to grind. So depending on how you're running the formula, one fed steer's fatty trim needs the lean off about two cull cows to come out the other side as an 81 or an 85.
You cannot manufacture cows.
And the July inventory says you won't be manufacturing them soon
USDA's midyear Cattle report, released July 24, is the one everybody read as the turn. It deserves a closer look, because what it actually describes is stabilization rather than expansion — and for the lean market specifically, it makes the next two years harder, not easier.¹⁸
July 1 inventory, 2025 to 2026:
All cattle and calves — 94.0 million to 94.2 million, up 200,000 Beef cows — 28.7 million to 28.5 million, down 1% Beef replacement heifers — 3.70 million to 3.80 million, up 3% Cattle outside feedlots — 33.8 million to 33.6 million, down 1% 2026 calf crop — 32.5 million, down 2%
The headline number went up. Underneath it, the beef cow herd got smaller again, the calf crop is forecast down 2%, and the supply of cattle outside feedlots — everything that eventually becomes a kill — fell to 33.6 million head.
The one line pointing the other way is replacement heifers, up 100,000 head. That is a real signal and it's the first thing I'd watch. But run the ratio: 3.80 million replacements against a 28.5 million beef cow herd is about 13% — roughly what it takes to hold cow numbers flat, not to grow them. And heifers were still 4.25 million of the 11.4 million head on feed on July 1, better than a third of the mix.⁸
Here's the part that matters for anything you grind.
Retention and lean supply move in opposite directions. Every heifer held back for breeding is an animal that doesn't get killed, doesn't become trim, and doesn't produce a cull cow for another five or six years. Every cow kept in the herd to rebuild is a cow not going to the packer. The exact behavior that eventually fixes the cattle supply makes the lean shortage worse first — and a 2% smaller calf crop means 2027 fed supply tightens on top of it.
Which means the 90s market is now a global market, and it will stay one through this cycle regardless of what the cutout does.
Part Three — The consumer didn't leave. They went to the grind.
Set the table first, all of it from USDA's retail series for June 2026:⁴
All-fresh beef — $9.64/lb Sirloin steak, Choice boneless — $14.45/lb Round roast, Choice boneless — $8.96/lb Ground beef — $6.83/lb Pork — $4.92/lb Retail broiler composite — $2.38/lb
Beef is running roughly twice pork and four times chicken at the counter. And the twelve months ending July 2026 tell the story in one line: beef and veal up 9.4%, pork up 0.5%, poultry down 0.5%. Chicken specifically fell 2.7% — its largest twelve-month decline since 2016.⁵
Within beef, the whole case moved: beef roasts up 13.5%, steaks up 9.6%, ground beef up 9.0%.
The consumer did not respond by leaving the category. They responded by changing what they pulled out of it.
The move is measurable, and it's inside the beef case
Ground beef ran $6.83 a pound in June against sirloin at $14.45 — better than a two-to-one spread. And the two ends of the case moved differently through the first half of the year. Ground beef went from $6.75 in January to $6.83 in June, up 1.2%. Sirloin went from $13.84 to $14.45, up 4.4%.⁴
The premium end carried the price increase. The value end held.
Volume followed the spread. In 2025, ground beef sales reached $17.4 billion, up 14.7% — the strongest dollar growth of roughly 85,000 grocery subcategories tracked.¹² Fresh ground beef is now about half of retail beef volume and roughly 36% of dollars.¹¹ Over the most recent 52 weeks, total beef volume rose 4.2% and ground rose 3.3%, while steak volume slipped 2.7% across the trailing 13 weeks.¹³
Ground chicken, ground pork and ground lamb all grew over the same period. This is a category-wide move toward grind — beef is just the biggest version of it.
Which creates a problem, because grind needs lean
Here is where it stops being a retail story and becomes a procurement story.
A fed steer gives you fatty trim. For the week ending August 14, fresh 50% lean traded at $144.89 per hundredweight — better than 1.5 million pounds of it changed hands in that week alone.¹⁴ That product is worthless as ground beef by itself. It has to be blended with lean to become anything you can put in a chub.
The domestic source of that lean is cull cows and bulls. Beef cow slaughter in the first quarter of 2026 was down 18% year over year.⁶
So the industry needs more lean than it has ever needed, at exactly the moment the domestic supply of it is disappearing.
Look at what that does to the price of a pound of lean
USDA's boneless processing beef report, week ending August 14, 2026 — domestic, FOB plant, national, weighted average per cwt:¹⁴
Fresh 92–94% — $489.21 Fresh 90% — $455.14 Fresh 85% — $385.66 Fresh 81% — $334.37 Fresh 65% — $234.53 Fresh 50% — $144.89
Now put that next to the carcass it came from. For the week ending August 14, 2026, the Choice boxed beef cutout averaged $373.24. National fresh 90% lean that same week traded at $455.14.¹⁵ ¹⁴
Lean grinding beef was worth about $82 a hundredweight more than the average pound of a Choice carcass.
That is the relationship inverting. For most of my career the 90s traded under the cutout — trim was what was left after you sold the cuts. It isn't anymore. The grind is now bidding against the middle meats for the same animal.
And that is why the lean is coming from overseas
USDA is direct about what the import book actually is. ERS describes the United States as a net beef importer "purchasing lower-value, grass-fed beef destined for processing," notes that a majority of U.S. beef imports are destined for blending into ground beef, and puts about one-third of all imports in the single category of frozen boneless manufacturing trimmings out of Australia, New Zealand and Brazil.¹⁶
The price signal is doing the rest of the work. Ninety percent lean, per cwt, same week ending August 14:¹⁷
Domestic fresh 90% — $455.14 Australia / New Zealand cow meat — $350.00 to $355.00 South America cow meat — $328.00 to $330.00
Imported 90s were running roughly $100 to $127 a hundredweight under domestic, for product going into the same blend.
Chain it together and the whole article closes:
The consumer moved to grind. Grind requires lean. Domestic lean is disappearing with the cow herd. Imported lean is both available and materially cheaper. Beef imports are forecast up 13.8% to a record 6.13 billion pounds — enough to cover 96% of the entire decline in domestic production.²
The hamburger the consumer is buying at $6.83 a pound is being held together by imported lean. That isn't a talking point. It's the arithmetic of the blend.
One honest note on where the lean market sits right now
USDA's August 14 import report noted that import prices were mostly moderately lower on slow trading, with weaker demand continuing to pressure both domestic and imported lean and trimmings. The same report flagged Brazilian imports falling short of expected levels last month and Australia/New Zealand arrivals remaining light.¹⁷
The structural story — fewer cows, more grind, more imported lean — is a multi-year story and none of it has changed. But the lean market cooled in late July, and anyone reading this as a straight-line call should know the most recent print softened.
A footnote on substitution
There is peer-reviewed work worth knowing here, with a caveat attached.
A Rotterdam demand system published this year in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, estimated on both public USDA data and retail scanner transactions, found beef the least own-price-elastic of the three major proteins, and found no statistically measurable substitution between beef and chicken in either direction. The measurable substitution runs between beef and pork, and between chicken and pork.⁹ Earlier work from the same group found meat demand becomes more inelastic at higher prices, with cross-price effects shrinking as prices rise.¹⁰
The caveat is real: those estimates run on 2009–2018 data and pre-date this price regime entirely. I'd treat them as the shape of the map rather than a live parameter — the current USDA price and volume data above is the stronger evidence, and it points the same direction.
Part Four — Pork ran the same play and got a different answer
Pork started from the same place beef did — fewer breeding females, year after year — and ended up somewhere completely different.
The results are worth studying, because they're not good.
Same starting problem
The U.S. hog industry has lost nearly 600,000 breeding females since June 2020. The June 1, 2026 breeding inventory stood at 5.88 million head, and year-over-year breeding inventory has now declined in 22 of the last 24 quarters.²
On the breeding side, that is a contraction on par with what the cow herd has been through.
Completely different outcome
And yet:¹
2016 to 2025:
Commercial hog slaughter — 118,219,900 head to 128,201,100 head, up 8.4% Dressed weight, all hogs — 211 lb to 215 lb, up 1.9% Pork production — 24.957 billion lb to 27.594 billion lb, up 10.6%
Fewer sows. More hogs. Ten and a half percent more pork.
Note what that table does not say. The market hog herd didn't shrink — packers ran ten million more head in 2025 than in 2016. Only the breeding herd contracted.
That distinction is the whole section, and it comes down to biology rather than strategy.
A cow gives you one calf a year. No amount of management moves that number, so a smaller cow herd means fewer cattle with a two-to-three-year lag and no way around it. A sow gives you better than two litters a year, and the pigs per litter keep climbing — the March–May 2026 rate hit 11.87, extending a run of record quarterly rates going back to 2022.² Output per breeding female rose faster than the breeding herd fell.
Add a growing stream of imported feeder animals — live hog imports are forecast at 7.455 million head this year, up from 6.988 million in 2025 — and pork never had a supply gap to cover in the first place.²
Beef covered its gap with carcass weight and imported meat. Pork didn't have one. Production is forecast higher in 2026 and higher again in 2027.
Opposite outcome
Here's what it bought them.
2025 actual, 2026 forecast, 2027 forecast:
Per capita pork, retail lb — 49.3, 49.5, 49.7 Producer-sold hog price, $/cwt — 68.80, 65.32, 65.00 5-area steer price, $/cwt — 224.37, 245.35, 249.00
Per capita pork consumption is flat and has been for a decade. Hog prices are forecast lower in both 2026 and 2027 while cattle stay near records — even after USDA trimmed its cattle price forecast in August on weaker-than-expected demand for fed cattle.²
Retail tells the same story. Pork's retail value stayed inside an eight-cent band — between $4.87 and $4.95 a pound — every single month of the first half of 2026. Bacon actually fell, from $6.98 in January to $6.56 in June.⁴
And the producer's share of it: 23.7% of the retail pork dollar in June, against 55.0% on the beef side.⁴
Pork won on volume and lost on price. Completely.
Why, and what it means
Go back to the elasticity grid.
Pork is the most own-price-elastic protein in the system at −2.016. It is also the most responsive to beef's price at +0.952. Put those together and you have a category whose volume is highly punishable by its own price increases and highly dependent on somebody else's.
That is a structurally difficult position. It means pork's realistic path to better margins runs through beef staying expensive — not through pork demand improving on its own. And it means any attempt to price up gets punished harder in pork than in any other protein.
There's also a trade dimension. Pork exports roughly 26% of production; beef exports about 9%.² Pork's price is set in a global market to a degree beef's simply isn't, which adds a layer of volatility the domestic numbers don't show.
What this means if you price protein for a living
Three things.
One. Stop reading the kill as a demand signal. Head count, carcass weight and net trade are three independent variables, and they moved in three different directions this year. First quarter 2026: slaughter down 8.5%, production down 6%. Anyone forecasting off head count alone was wrong by two and a half points inside a single quarter.
Two. The lean deficit is structural, and herd rebuilding makes it worse before it makes it better. Beef cow slaughter is down 18%, the beef cow herd got smaller again in July, and the replacement heifers now being retained are animals that won't produce a cull cow for another five or six years. If you're buying grind, you're buying in a global market — and you will be for this entire cycle.
Three. The pressure on beef isn't coming from the other proteins. Beef ran nearly 10% in July against chicken at −2.7% and pork at +0.5%, and gave up two tenths of one percent of the pounds. What moved was the mix, inside the beef case, from premium cut to grind. That's a margin problem rather than a volume problem, and it changes what you have to be good at: the 90s market, not the middle meats, is now where the beef business gets decided.
The herd is smaller. The consumer isn't.
Carpe Diem, Cody
Footnotes
USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Livestock Slaughter 2025 Summary (April 2026) and Livestock Slaughter 2016 Summary (April 2017). Commercial slaughter and commercial production; dressed weights on a federally inspected basis.
USDA, World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, WASDE-674, August 12, 2026, and Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook, LDP-M-385, July 16, 2026, for detail not carried in WASDE.
Ibid. Per capita disappearance, retail weight basis. USDA revises this series monthly; all figures here are the August 12, 2026 vintage.
USDA, Economic Research Service, Meat Price Spreads, retail values and farm share, data through June 2026.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index — July 2026, released August 12, 2026. Twelve-month percent changes, not seasonally adjusted.
USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Livestock Slaughter, released April 23, 2026.
USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, Actual Slaughter Under Federal Inspection, week ending July 18, 2026.
USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Cattle on Feed, released July 24, 2026.
Luke, J.R., G.T. Tonsor and T.C. Schroeder, "U.S. meat demand elasticity estimates: using publicly available data versus scanner data," Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 55(1): 104–123, 2026.
Lusk, J.L. and G.T. Tonsor, "How Meat Demand Elasticities Vary with Price, Income, and Product Category," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 38(4): 673–711, 2016.
Today's Beef Consumer, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, October 2025, using Circana retail protein sales data.
Power of Meat 2026, 210 Analytics.
Beef Marketplace Update, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, using Circana multi-market retail performance data, period ending January 2026.
USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, National/Regional Weekly Boneless Processing Beef and Beef Trimmings — Negotiated Sales (LM_XB460), week ending August 14, 2026. National FOB plant basis.
USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, National Weekly Boxed Beef Cutout and Boxed Beef Cuts — Negotiated Sales (LM_XB459), week ending August 14, 2026. Choice 600–900 lb weekly average.
USDA, Economic Research Service, Cattle & Beef topic overview, and "An Assessment of U.S. Beef Imports," Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook, LDP-M-349, July 2023.
USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service, Import Beef Trade (NW_LS421), August 14, 2026. East Coast, 0–15 day delivery.
USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Cattle, released July 24, 2026.