Beef prices continue to rise as cattle ranchers find ways to cut costs

Cattle ranchers from Texas and Oklahoma learned tools to keep their farms thriving Friday at the Texas A&M Beef Sustainability Field Day in Wise County. This comes at a time when consumers are seeing record beef prices.

The cost of beef continues to increase, but cattle ranchers aren't cashing in.  

"Diesel is a prime example. Yesterday, it cost me $175 to fill up one pickup truck," Ron Gill said.

Gill has owned Gill Cattle Company since 1989. He's trying to find ways to keep his overhead low.

"We'll probably have cut out some trips to the ranch just because of the fuel costs," Gill said.

The national average price for a pound of uncooked ground beef is $7.15. That's up 7.9% from a year ago. The USDA reports that the price of ground beef has increased by about 60% over the past five years, and the cost of steak has risen by 41-57%, depending on the cut, during the same period.

The USDA reports the lowest cattle herd since 2015, which compounds the problem. Hugh Aljoe with the Noble Research Institute said the drought has added to the issue,

"Of course, prices are going to go up because of it's just a factor of supply and demand," Aljoe said. "The challenge with growing the cowherd is you've got to have forage grasses. We got a lot of this country that had, like Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, some of the biggest producing states, we've been in drought for three out of the last four years."

Gill believes it could take years to rebuild herds and bring down beef prices.

"If you want to continue to have good steaks and hopefully get the cost down, it's going to take patience to do that because it takes them about two to three years for the cattle inventory numbers to come back up," Gill said.

President Donald Trump announced plans to cut tariffs on beef imports this summer, as well as bring in more than 660,000 pounds of foreign beef. An American Farm Bureau analysis found that it has little impact on beef prices, so consumers may have to pay more to buy beef for several years to come.