Patrick Thomas

And as Sean told me, it got particularly bad during COVID.

So you had a bottleneck at the meat packing level and you had too much supply and there wasn't anywhere to put them and their animals were almost worthless.

And that made a lot of guys take out debt to stay in business.

It put a lot of ranchers like Sean in pretty dire straits.

As I think Sean put it, the rain started coming again in 2023.

Like, really good.

The profit margin for one animal for a rancher is about $1,000 right now.

In 2020, it was $2.

Yes.

The biggest loser right now is the meatpacker.

But now that the meatpackers are back up to full speed and cattle herds have shrunk... The meatpacker is losing about $300 per animal that goes through their plant.

Well, you have some of these big packers.

I mean, JBS, Cargill, Tyson, they have plants that process 6,000 cattle a day.

And they're losing 300 bucks per animal going through it.

So we're talking billions of dollars in losses that these packers are sustaining right now.

Yeah, it's how the pendulum swings and it's really swung in the rancher's direction.

And it's been so severe in this particular time that you've seen Tyson closed one of their largest plants in Lexington, Nebraska in January of this year.

You've had expectations in the industry that more big plants will have to close just because it's so unsustainable for packers to keep losing this amount of money.

And keep in mind, Ryan, when one of these plants closes, it's a big deal for the local economies.

They employ a ton of people.