I run a small farm. I have animals. I don't use antibiotics or vaccines or herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers (I use manure straight from the animal's butt to ground).
I have about 20 cows and I should be able to raise 10 steer a year for sale. All grass-fed. One steer should feed a family of 6 for a whole year. You can get half a cow. Costs are CHEAPER than buying at the store, and it's MUCH higher quality than anything you can buy. See, I have very little inputs, just my labor, hay, and some protein supplement in the winter (made from cottonseed meal / soy beans and some minerals).
I am one of THOUSANDS of people doing this all across the country. We are pretty much everywhere. You'll also find people running row crops (corn, soy, and pretty much everything else) in your area.
How do we find each other? I don't know, but I know that farms that have been doing this for a few decades aren't looking for more customers. Somehow people are making the connection and they're getting their farm products into people's freezers.
What do YOU need to do? It's really, really simple. Start looking for local farms. Start talking to local people who know the farms. Visit some farms. Ask questions. Ask them who they know doing what. We all know each other because we talk to each other all the time. I can tell you exactly what my neighbors are doing because I see them almost every day.
A really, really easy way to start is to buy a cow, or half a cow, even a quarter cow. Find three more families. Invest in a chest freezer. (They're extremely efficient and cheap.) Find a farmer who raises cows, and ask him if he or someone he knows sells finished steer, and where they get them processed. Expect to pay about $2,000 for the animal and about $1,000 for the processing, more or less. (Probably more nowadays, but prices will go down soon.) Split that four ways and you only need about $750 for about 125 lbs of meat.
The meat will last at least a year in your freezer. Half will be ground beef. The rest will be roasts and steaks, as you ordered the processor to do it.
You will NEVER go back to store bought meat.
Heck, I brought in some of the ground beef I bought to feed my workers on their breaks. They said those burgers were the BEST meat texture and flavor they've ever had, bar none. Too bad I can't sell it to my customers. (And we buy the highest quality patties we can find -- never frozen, 100% angus, american raised)
Start making plans now. Start talking with friends and families. You will not regret it!
And this is only step 1. Once you've got your beef supply, find someone selling lambs for slaughter, and learn how to do it yourself, save yourself the expense of a butcher. It's really easy. I'd sell my lambs at about $200 a pop, and you'd get something like 40 lbs of meat from it.
Chickens are super-easy to raise yourself. It takes about 3 months from start to finish for meat birds. Start with the Freedom Ranger Color Yield. I had really good results with them. Egg layers are super easy too. My family processed about 100 meat birds in about 6 hours. No plucker, just fingers to pluck them. Those birds disappeared from our freezer FAST.
I have about 20 cows and I should be able to raise 10 steer a year for sale. All grass-fed. One steer should feed a family of 6 for a whole year. You can get half a cow. Costs are CHEAPER than buying at the store, and it's MUCH higher quality than anything you can buy. See, I have very little inputs, just my labor, hay, and some protein supplement in the winter (made from cottonseed meal / soy beans and some minerals).
I am one of THOUSANDS of people doing this all across the country. We are pretty much everywhere. You'll also find people running row crops (corn, soy, and pretty much everything else) in your area.
How do we find each other? I don't know, but I know that farms that have been doing this for a few decades aren't looking for more customers. Somehow people are making the connection and they're getting their farm products into people's freezers.
What do YOU need to do? It's really, really simple. Start looking for local farms. Start talking to local people who know the farms. Visit some farms. Ask questions. Ask them who they know doing what. We all know each other because we talk to each other all the time. I can tell you exactly what my neighbors are doing because I see them almost every day.
A really, really easy way to start is to buy a cow, or half a cow, even a quarter cow. Find three more families. Invest in a chest freezer. (They're extremely efficient and cheap.) Find a farmer who raises cows, and ask him if he or someone he knows sells finished steer, and where they get them processed. Expect to pay about $2,000 for the animal and about $1,000 for the processing, more or less. (Probably more nowadays, but prices will go down soon.) Split that four ways and you only need about $750 for about 125 lbs of meat.
The meat will last at least a year in your freezer. Half will be ground beef. The rest will be roasts and steaks, as you ordered the processor to do it.
You will NEVER go back to store bought meat.
Heck, I brought in some of the ground beef I bought to feed my workers on their breaks. They said those burgers were the BEST meat texture and flavor they've ever had, bar none. Too bad I can't sell it to my customers. (And we buy the highest quality patties we can find -- never frozen, 100% angus, american raised)
Start making plans now. Start talking with friends and families. You will not regret it!
And this is only step 1. Once you've got your beef supply, find someone selling lambs for slaughter, and learn how to do it yourself, save yourself the expense of a butcher. It's really easy. I'd sell my lambs at about $200 a pop, and you'd get something like 40 lbs of meat from it.
Chickens are super-easy to raise yourself. It takes about 3 months from start to finish for meat birds. Start with the Freedom Ranger Color Yield. I had really good results with them. Egg layers are super easy too. My family processed about 100 meat birds in about 6 hours. No plucker, just fingers to pluck them. Those birds disappeared from our freezer FAST.
Each year, every female cow can give birth to 1 calf. Half of them are bulls and half are heifers. The heifers take 2 years to mature. At 24 months, they give birth to their first calf.
The cattle population can grow exponentially. In two years, there will be 50% more breeding cows in the US, even if we don't import a single cow.
The supply of cattle rises and falls according to droughts and prices. The prices are high, so every cattle farmer on planet earth is keeping their heifer calves and going to turn them into breeders. This means, for a few years, there is going to be a beef shortage, but in 4 or 5 years, we'll be back in business.
What killed the cattle business is a few years ago the South had a terrific drought. This destroyed the hay supply in the US. Without cheap hay, keeping cows was financially irresponsible, so people sold off their stock. I remember seeing LONG lines of trailers at the sale barn a few years back where people were getting rid of their cows at ANY price since hay prices were too high.
Now everyone and their uncle wants a cow but nobody has any surplus cows. That's why the prices are so high. In a few years, there will be plenty of cattle on the market and people will get picky and choosy about what kind of breeding cow they want.
You stated that we are at a really low level of cattle populations. This is true. You said it in a way that suggests cattle are going to disappear or prices are going to keep going up or that there's some sort of scarcity like we're mining cattle out of a mountain and we're running out of proven reserves.
The reason why prices are high is because we had an unprecedented drought in cattle country here in the south starting in 2021. This area is also where tons of hay is grown and shipped out throughout the US. A lot of cattle growers outside of this region rely on our hay to feed their cows cheaply. Hay prices went through the roof and a lot of people all across the country lost their farms because of it.
Because of the drought, people sold their cows at dirt-cheap prices. They had to get rid of them. No one wanted cows when feed is expensive and hay is not available.
Now that the drought is done (and we had 4 years of back-to-back droughts since then in my area) people want to grow cows again. Except they don't have cows. So they want to buy cows, so the price of cows (the female kind) went up by a lot.
Now, cows come from cows. You get 1 calf from a cow in a year, and half of them more or less are female. One bull can impregnate a large number of cows, even more if you do artificial insemination (that's what AI means down here in cattle country.)
It takes about 2 years for a heifer to fully mature so she can breed back.
This means in about 2 years, we'll have 50% more calves. I don't know of many markets where you wait a few years and production increase by 50%. And this compounds, so in 4 years you're going to have 100% more calves. (More or less -- you can learn how exponential growth and populations work on your time.)
We will not be worried about the number of cows in the US in a few years. Prices will return to normal. Then there will be a surplus or another drought and prices will go down. Then we'll get rain and prices will go up again. The market is constantly fluctuating. It always has and it always will. The price tells us cattle growers whether to buy more land, more hay and more calves, or sell land, calves and hay.
Smart cattle men sell before the drought (there's ways to tell) or have a backup plan for surviving droughts without selling (AKA keep a lot of cash on hand to buy feed when it is not cheap!) Buy high and sell low is how you get poor fast. You've got to be able to buy cows when no one wants them and sell them when everyone wants them. I have a small farm and I sold $30k of cows and calves last year. It was a good year to have a small farm. Had I sold them the year before, I would've gotten half or less than that.
Fuck off with your walls of text not addressing this.
Of COURSE we're going to be at a low for cattle in 80 years.
Did you miss that part where I explained what happens when suddenly, there isn't a bunch of cheap hay everywhere in the US?
And 4 years from now, cattle inventory will be completely normal.