The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently released the July Cattle Report, which confirmed that the cumulative effects of drought the past two years have accelerated liquidation of the beef cattle herd.
According to the report, July 1 inventory of all cattle and calves was 98.8 million head, down two percent year-over-year. It added that the beef cow herd went down by 2.4 percent year-over-year, a decline of 750,000 heads from July 2021 to the current total of 30.35 million heads. Also, the current beef cow inventory has declined by 6.3 percent, or a total of 2.05 million heads. Beef replacement heifers were down by 3.5 percent year-over-year.
Feeder cattle supplies are estimated from the sum of inventories of other heifers and steers (over 500 pounds) plus calves (under 500 pounds) minus cattle on feed. The estimated July 1 feeder supply was down 2.7 percent from last year.
Derrell Peel, an agricultural economics professor and specialist in livestock marketing at Oklahoma State University, wrote in the farm journal AGWeb that June feedlot marketings were up two percent year-over-year while placements in June were down 2.4 percent from one year ago.
“This is the fourth consecutive month of lower feedlot placements. In the past two months, placements have consisted of increased numbers of cattle under 700 pounds with sharper decreases in placements over 700 pounds leading to an overall decline in placements. Placements would have fallen faster without lightweight placements. Increased lightweight placements now mean that fewer cattle will be available for placement later,” Peel said.
Cattle producers are destocking at a rapid rate as pasture conditions deteriorate rapidly. The volume of feeder cattle in Oklahoma auctions over the past two weeks is up 24 percent year-over-year. It appears that calves are being weaned and marketed early.
Health Ranger Mike Adams disclosed in his situation update podcast that several Texas cattle raisers confirmed to him that cattle liquidation in the area is up by 80 percent.
“This is happening due to the extended drought affecting Texas, Oklahoma, and much of the southern and western parts of the country. The drought not only reduces grass production in the fields being grazed by cows, but it also causes hay production to plummet, reducing the future food supply that could keep cows fed through the fall and winter,” he said.
Adams said this will cause a temporary glut of beef in the food supply chain and would lower beef prices in the short term. But by the year 2025, the prices will surely skyrocket as cattle remain in short supply.
“It takes several years of good rain to replenish cattle populations and bring beef prices back into an affordable range,” the Health Ranger said.
“Panicking” Texas ranchers sell off cattle as hay and water supply dwindle
North Texas ranchers have been forced to make some really tough decisions, like selling off their cattle, due to very limited hay and water supply brought by the expanding summer drought. (Related: Drought-stricken Texas finally gets some rain, but it may not be enough to save crops and cattle.)
Grass has stopped growing with no rain and high temperatures. Grasshoppers have reportedly been destroying what’s available in some counties. Stock ponds are now starting to run low on water as well.
The drought has caused panic to most ranchers, driving them to sell off their entire herds as they do not have any other options. In the past few days, lines of trailers waiting to drop off cattle for auction have gone viral all over social media.
At the Decatur Livestock Market, owner Kimberly Irwin said trucks were stacked a mile in each direction, eventually unloading more than 2,600 animals, the highest numbers since the extreme drought of 2011. “You know, you want to hang on, but it’s just hard,” Irwin lamented.
She added that most of the cows have been older as owners are hoping they can keep the younger ones until conditions change.
“I don’t think it can break quick enough to save me, to tell the truth,” said Lee McLachlin, a rancher from Springtown.
McLachlin said he was holding off as long as he can with his cows, but he is aware that even a good rain now will not do much to bring the grass back quickly. He added that he is concerned about hay availability later in the year, with prices now already running over $100 per bale.
Visit FoodCollapse.com for more news related to the disruption of food supply and collapsing global food economy.
Watch the below video that talks about the current cattle liquidation situation in Texas.
This video is from the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Mass CATTLE deaths send shockwaves through food supply as speculation rises: Are they being poisoned on purpose?
- Texas drought could eclipse drought of 2011, the state’s worst on record.
- US crops, cattle herds at risk due to “intense heat and dry conditions.”
Sources include:
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
