AUDIO: Randy Blach, CattleFax
The CEO of CattleFax says tight cattle supplies could cause disruptions to the supply chain.
Randy Blach says 2025 was a good example. “We came into the year, and we had about 25,000 more hooks than we had cattle on a weekly basis,” he says. “That situation deteriorated significantly from a packer’s point of view by the time we got into the middle of the year and the Mexican border was closed.”
He tells Brownfield before the closure of the Lexington, Nebraska beef processing facility there was excess slaughter capacity. “We would have had capacity to harvest 500,000 head of fed cattle on a weekly basis,” he says. “We were only going to have about 450,000 or 455,000 head of cattle a week that would be available.”
Blach says when herd expansion begins in earnest, supplies will get tighter. “We’re in a situation that the packing margins are extremely poor, very red, and at some point you risk losing capacity,” he says.
He says if the slaughter capacity continues to decline, it will give more leverage to processors.
