In New Mexico’s cattle country, record beef prices offer a brief reprieve

YESO — Down a dirt road in De Baca County, outside the ghost town of Yeso in the prairie of eastern New Mexico, Jimmie Fitzgerald raises cattle, like his father and grandfather before him.

Fitzgerald and his wife, Sarah, own De Baca Land and Cattle, a ranching business out of Fort Sumner. As beef prices across the country hit record highs, many New Mexico cattle ranchers — who often go years barely breaking even or earning only a razor-thin profit — have found themselves with a chance to catch their breath.

“We’ve been running a deficit, so we’re just now getting our head above water,” Fitzgerald said.

Since the pandemic, years of drought — combined with inflation, tariffs and parasitic worms that halted cattle trade from Mexico — have thinned ranchers’ herds. Low cattle supply combined with steady demand for beef has created some of the highest prices ever recorded.

The price of ground beef in September was $6.32 per pound, up nearly 12% from the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Other beef products have risen similarly — ground chuck is up 75 cents since last year and sirloin steak is up $2.35.

Some ranchers, like Bronson Corn, say the high prices have provided them with a much-needed windfall after years of financial hardship.

In years past, Corn, a fifth-generation rancher and the president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, said he was lucky if he broke even. Now, high beef prices have given him the first opportunity he’s ever had to pay off his long-term debt.

“This is the first time the cattle industry has been truly profitable since the ’80s,” Corn said.

Corn runs Legacy Land and Livestock in Roswell. Like the majority of ranches in New Mexico, Corn’s is a cow-calf operation, where a herd of cows and bulls produces calves, which are weaned and sold to the next stage of the production chain.

Cow-calf operations like Corn’s are the biggest sector of New Mexico’s agriculture industry and the most likely to see returns from high beef prices, said Frannie Miller, professor of agricultural economics at New Mexico State University.

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of profit opportunity,” Miller said.

The benefits ranchers are reaping from record beef prices vary widely depending on the structure of their business and where they fall in the supply chain, said Jason Banegas, an NMSU economist.

“It’s really hard to generalize, to tell you the truth, because some people are doing great. Some people are not,” Banegas said.

Last week, President Donald Trump proposed a plan to buy beef from Argentina to lower prices for American consumers, which was met with mixed responses from the agriculture industry.

Trump’s idea to bring in already-processed beef won’t solve the lack of live animal trade in the U.S., Banegas said.

“It’s maybe a stopgap in some ways, but in other ways, I don’t think it’s realistic,” he said.

Beef prices are up, but so is the price of everything else — trucks and tractors are more expensive and parts are double what they were five years ago, Fitzgerald said.

For ranchers like the Fitzgeralds, who sometimes run a yearling operation — buying calves to raise them until they reach market weight, then selling them — the high price of replacement calves, known as feeder cattle, means most of their profits must go back into the business.

“Sale prices are good, but replacement costs are astronomical,” Fitzgerald said.

The work at De Baca Land and Cattle is seven days a week, Fitzgerald said. Days sometimes start with catching horses at 3:30 a.m. and end around 9:30 at night, or at 2 o’clock the next morning, when a new set of trucks come in, he said.

“We try to go to church on Sundays, but if there’s work to do, we do it,” he said.

Despite the long hours, hard work and marginal profits, most of New Mexico’s cattle ranchers stay in the business to carry on a family legacy, or to create one for the next generation, said Carollann Romo, executive director of the New Mexico Beef Council.

Sarah Fitzgerald, a fourth-generation New Mexico cattle rancher, said she and her husband are doing it for a future for their daughter Della, who, at 6 years old, rides a horse next to her father as they herd cattle into trucks bound for Missouri.

“I think we’re tasked to care for God’s creation,” she said. “It’s something that we take seriously.”

Despite record prices, beef sales were holding strong earlier this year, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects the average American will consume 58.5 pounds of beef per person in 2025, a number that has stayed relatively constant over the last decade.

“There’s an increase in protein consumption for a lot of health reasons,” Miller said.

At Brett Rizzi’s Albuquerque butcher shop, No Bull Prime Meats, people are still buying beef even though his high-grade meats and Japanese wagyu skew more expensive than regular grocery store fare.

“I think they’re buying a little more rationed, meaning they won’t buy as much,” Rizzi said. “But they’re still buying.”

Ranchers want shoppers to know that when they get sticker shock from the price of hamburger meat at the grocery store, it isn’t because of them.

“We don’t set a price,” Corn said. “Supply and demand set that price for us.”

And as long as consumers keep buying, prices will continue to rise.

“That will be the regulator,” Fitzgerald said. “People will quit buying it, and when they do, it goes down. Then we say, ‘Hey, it was too high for normal Americans.’ We’re just not there.”

Ranching in eastern New Mexico