Author Description

The U.S. beef industry is continually pursuing more sustainable production methods and attempting to set industry-wide goals and targets for sustainability. However, in order to have effective targets, we must understand where the industry has been and where it is trending. Therefore, we use National Agricultural Statistics Service data from 1980 to 2020 and U.S. Agricultural Census data from 2002 to 2017 to provide a birds-eye view of historical trends in cattle inventory, labor, and income. Recognizing that regional-level aggregate data analysis can provide important insights into the industry's broad landscape, but it can also obscure critical nuances at the state and county level. Therefore, not only does this report synthesize general trends, it also identifies vital state-level outliers and hypothesizes factors that may be contributing to their outlier status. Important findings include a measure of cattle consolidation in the central and northern Great Plains, a sector-wide shift in contract versus hired labor, and overall growth in the number of small-scale (less than 50 head) ranches across the country.