Patrick Thomas

I'm glad that this is on the family tab.

Ranchers are just, they're really enjoying these good times.

They've historically always struggled to make profits, and now they're really making money, and a lot of them have decided that they're going to hold on to it and

There's not a lot of signs of significant herd rebuilding.

So that creates an environment where beef is just the premier luxury protein.

Several years ago, cattle ranchers across the United States started shrinking their herds.

This was due to some pretty poor financial conditions following the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then in 22, we had a massive drought that made it really expensive to

feed livestock.

So it made more financial sense for ranchers to send their animals to market, sent more to slaughter and essentially just shrunk their herds.

And now we're in a situation where we just don't have the supply to meet demand.

And that's pushed prices up to these record levels over the last year.

ranchers are just they're really enjoying these good times they've historically always struggled to make profits and now they're really making money and a lot of them have decided that they're going to hold on to it and there's not a lot of signs of significant herd rebuilding there are more farmers over 75 than there are under 35 so some of these guys are just choosing to retire they're not going to expand so that creates an environment where beef is just the premier luxury protein as some people are saying

What that does is they've really increased the imports of lean ground beef, which allows for some more ground beef production.

It's not enough to really move the needle broadly.

And remember, some of the efforts of trying to incentivize herd rebuilding, it still takes two years due to the biological clock of the animals.

So once we do have rebuilding, we're still looking at high beef prices for two years at least.

By and large, demand has not fallen off.

People love protein.

They're really obsessed with high-quality steaks.