2-Year Trek From Turf to Table Delays Cheaper U.S. Beef

There’s little relief ahead for record U.S. steak and burger prices. While cattle ranchers like Brenda Richards are expanding herds for the first time in almost a decade, it can take two years to get more meat on the plate. After shrinking supply sent beef costs surging last year, the government still expects output to drop to a 22-year low in 2015. While ranchers are starting to breed more cows, calf gestation is nine months, with as much as 20 more before they are big enough to slaughter. Richards says she may increase her family’s 600-cow breeding herd to as many as 650. “It’s a little bit of an expansion,” said Richards, who has been farming in Reynolds Creek, Idaho, with her husband for three decades. “We’ve held steady for quite some time.” With supplies remaining tight, restaurant operator Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc. and Bloomin’ Brands Inc., owner of the Outback Steakhouse chain, are forecasting gains in 2015 beef costs. Retail prices will jump 5 percent to 6 percent this year, more than any other food group and double the rate for all foods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. The cattle herd on Jan. 1 in the U.S., the world’s largest beef producer, was 1.4 percent bigger than a year earlier at 89.8 million head, the first increase for that date in eight years, USDA data show. The herd began last year as the smallest since 1952, after droughts from Texas through the Midwest dried pastures and pushed the price of feed corn to records in 2012...more