After a decade, Minnesota beef farmers finally having a good year

BLACKDUCK, MINN. – In Minnesota’s north country, a former kindergarten teacher-turned-rancher carefully walks forward on muddy, thawing ground toward a knot of dark heifers. They stare with curious white faces. One high-ended cow trots away awkwardly, a classic signal that she’ll soon be calving.

“That one shaking its tail? That one’s probably calving, too,” said Rachel Gray, fourth-generation northern Minnesota farmer. She starts counting. “One, two, three, there’s probably four in here calving.”

The remote woods north of Bemidji is beef country. And for the first time in a decade, the ranchers raising the livestock that get turned into hamburgers and steaks like their profit margins.

“Right now,” Gray said, walking through her barns on a mild February day, “cattle producers are finally feeling like we can breathe.”

Across America, high food prices — from eggs to Big Macs — dominate the conversation. But farmers will tell you high grocery store prices don’t translate to their bank accounts.

For more than a year, manufacturers of beef — slaughterhouses — have struggled. And economic trends are not necessarily getting better.

Recently, Beef Magazine predicted a “perfect storm” for producers this year, blaming drought, potential tariffs and a smaller national herd.

In December, Minnetonka-based Cargill, one of the nation’s Big 4 beef packers, laid off 8,000 workers or about 5% of its global employees, citing low commodity prices. The same week, another giant — Tyson Foods — announced the closure of a Kansas packing plant.

But in cattle country, from the grasslands out West to the feedlots near Iowa where animals fatten up on cornmeal, the prices are finally better.

In 2020, the price bottomed out close to $80 a head. This week, live cattle were trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange around $200 a head.

“People in the cattle business today are probably feeling a little bit better than they have the past couple of years,” said Jay Debertin, CEO of Inver Grove Heights-based CHS Inc., the nation’s largest farmer cooperative, while speaking in January with Neel Kashkari at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.

Eric Mousel, beef specialist with the University of Minnesota Extension in Grand Rapids, said the heady prices, counterintuitively, began with a drought in 2019 that swept across southern plains, decimating cattle herds.

Today, the national herd is roughly 20% smaller than five years ago, Mousel said. Those still left in the game have reaped benefits of increased demand.

“The price is always really cyclical, based on how many calves are available,” Mousel said. “Nobody was really paying attention to [the drop] because they were distracted by the pandemic, and then all of a sudden, there’s not enough cattle to go around.”

And the price relief couldn’t come soon enough.

Since 2002, Minnesota has lost roughly 25% of its beef cattle farms, dropping to around 11,700 farms in the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture census.

The lineage of Gray’s Beltrami County ranch starts with the lumber companies that clear-cut the region more than a century ago.

Early farmers were “cow, plow and a sow,” Gray said.

More crops followed. So did a proper dairy. But getting milk down to the processors in central Minnesota grew costly.

Around two decades ago, Gray’s parents traded in the dairy for beef cattle. They put up miles of fence, turned fields into paddocks. Soon cattle grazed on Little Timber Farms.

“We had really good markets in 2014 and then everything crashed,” said Gray, who does custom calving and raises heifers that are shipped around the country. “What we’re seeing now is a little bit different. The markets seem to have held longer.”

Life can be rugged in rural northern Minnesota. Gray’s husband travels much of the year working in the mining industry. A son has joined her on the farm, but finding day care for her grandchildren can be a chore.

Other than a trip to Texas earlier in February for Gray to accept a national award for environmental stewardship, vacations are few.

But she knows cattle, and she loves her job. And February is go-time.

For two weeks, in subzero temperatures, Gray lives in a bunkhouse in the barn. She layers up. On the off-chance there’s no calving, she’s catching a wink of sleep, maybe watching a little television, or checking her email. But usually, she’s calving — at midnight or 4 a.m., the baby cows can come at any time.

Gray’s business draws interest from as far away as West Virginia. The cattle on her pastures arrived from the western Dakotas.

Cattle country continues to change as conditions change. Some producers got out of the business during the down cycle. Now again, some producers are selling off herds, “getting out while the getting is good,” Gray said.

They also know that the good times might not last. Beef producers know not to trumpet their success. Farther south, crop farmers are struggling with low prices.

Plus, there are factors they cannot control. Tariff talks in Washington could rattle trade for an industry that sends cattle hooves, tongue, organs overseas.

But for the moment, Gray is focused close to home.

Monday morning, she visited the butcher shop in Nevis. In the afternoon, she turned back to the calving.

Another cow tottered around, confused. She was looking for her calf — but she hadn’t even delivered it yet.

“I’ll need to separate her later” from the other calves, Gray said, adding to her ever-growing list of afternoon chores.