From his corner booth at the Barton Creek Farmers Market, Jim Richardson sells beef, pork, chicken, eggs, milk and cheese.
His beef products include stew meat, steak and ground beef. And lately they’ve become pricier.
“I went up roughly a dollar a pound," Richardson said. "My processor went up that much or more. So without kind of keeping up, it erodes your profitability.”
Richardson Farms isn’t the only purveyor that’s had to raise beef prices recently, either. The average retail price of beef, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is now $9.69 per pound – the highest ever.
Richardson has worked with cattle as a rancher and a veterinarian for more than 50 years near Rockdale in central Texas. He doesn’t expect prices to come down in the near term.
“I’d say it’s going to be years,” he said. “It’s a real complex issue, and it’s not going to remedy quickly.”
The big reason why beef prices are so high is that the U.S. cattle herd is at its smallest since the 1950s. Years of drought have forced ranchers to sell cattle. As the population dwindles, each animal becomes more and more valuable.
“So we sell those [cattle], and that means then that we don’t grow the herd. And that’s the situation we’ve been in for a while,” said Brenda Boetel, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls.
Boetel said that in previous periods of high beef prices, customers turned more to less expensive proteins, like chicken or pork. But that hasn’t happened. Despite the costs, people are still buying beef.
“I’m actually surprised how resilient beef demand has continued to stay with the very high prices,” Boetel said.
Three Six General, a small butcher shop and grocery store in San Marcos, south of Austin, Texas, is crammed with display cases for cheese and proteins, plus coolers lining the walls with veggies, sausage, and chicken feet. In the back, workers marinate ribs, cut sheets of butcher paper, and grind black pepper.
Owner Matti Bills says that high prices have forced her to pay closer attention than ever before to what ranchers and suppliers charge her.
“Checking pricing quarterly, because things are fluctuating, has been really important to us surviving at all,” she said.
Bills buys pork, lamb and cuts of beef from local ranchers. While not sure when beef prices will drop again, Bills has noticed some price stability in shorter supply chains.
“I will say that the more local the product, the more insulated it is from the price increases,” she said. “You know like the further you get from the source, the more likely you’re going to be playing a game of telephone, and someone’s going to increase the price and not bring it back down.”
Boetel, the Wisconsin economist, believes prices still have room to go up. She’s expecting beef prices to climb even higher this month and next.
As for when the retail price will begin to come down, Boetel said that could be quite a while.
“When I’m talking year-over-year, I don’t really see that declining at least through ‘26,” she said.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
