Anna Pope

But we're not going to have a...

a study published on it from the USDA.

Now, there are some states, or specifically Minnesota, I remember doing an interview with somebody up there who has mentioned, you know, maybe pulling together enough resources together to kind of replicate it on a state level or try to pull some resources together there so they can have their own study.

But that's a massive undertaking.

And so some states won't be able to do that by themselves.

Yeah, farm incomes.

So whenever you talk to agriculture economists, the one thing they can say is beef is kind of the bright spot in the agriculture economy in terms of farm incomes.

So when you look at data from the Kansas City Federal Reserve and different things, you'll see crop-heavy states.

kind of their numbers as far as farm income are declining while states that are more reliant on beef are rising.

And that has to do with supply and demand.

And so basically the U.S.

's cattle herd is the smallest it has been since 1951.

And that is because of some rough droughts that has shrunk the herd.

And therefore, it's taken a long time to rebuild because it takes months for cows to breed calves and therefore to get them to be processed.

And so while we have seen a reduction, while we've seen a less amount of beef there to begin with, consumer demand has remained high.

And so that results in high prices.

And farmers or ranchers who raise beef are looking at this and saying, you know, we've had some

really rough years and we need some good years to offset the bad years and um so they're still facing high production costs they're still facing high input costs all the challenges are still there but beef is making money and so they're selling their cattle and so a lot of agriculture economists have been kind of waiting for signs in the in the markets to show that branchers will have to start holding it back their herds to rebuild the population

And so in states like mine where cattle is king, it also – I mean, we grow a lot of wheat.

Wheat is our top crop.