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Food/Drink: Cattle crisis; July 4 beef swaps; regenerative ag EO; Miso/Zume pizza robots; P&G store dramas
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Somewhere between the drought maps and the grocery aisle, America ran out of cows. Not completely, but enough that beef prices have become the most expensive line item on your Fourth of July shopping list. Ground beef averaged $6.73 a pound through May, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Some regional reports put fresh beef even higher, near $9.60 a pound. Prices are up 19% from a year ago by one measure, and 22% since January 2025 by another. However you slice it, the direction is the same: up, fast, and not slowing down before the holiday.
The short answer is drought. The longer answer involves years of ranchers getting squeezed out of business one bad season at a time. The US cattle herd now sits at 86.2 million head, the smallest it has been in 75 years. About 75% of the national herd is currently sitting in drought conditions, and grass does not grow without rain. Ranchers have been paying more for feed, hay, water, and credit just to keep animals alive, let alone grow their herds.
Live cattle prices climbed 37% between June 2024 and May 2026, actually faster than the retail price of beef, which rose 27% over the same stretch. That gap matters. It means the real squeeze is happening on the ranch, long before it ever reaches your grill.
Then there is the screwworm, a real flesh-eating pest that has forced the US to halt live cattle imports from Mexico. Fifteen confirmed cases have already shown up on US soil. It is one more reason the cattle supply cannot bounce back quickly, even with demand running hot.
Some of the shortfall gets filled by imports, especially record imports from New Zealand, which sends the fattier trim American ranchers do not produce enough of on their own. But imports alone were never going to solve this. Rebuilding a herd takes years, since a calf born today will not be market ready for a while yet.
While beef sets records for all the wrong reasons, chicken has barely moved. The Consumer Price Index for poultry rose just 1.8% over the past year. Wholesale chicken prices are hovering around $1.19 to $1.20 a pound and have actually ticked down slightly in recent weeks. Production forecasts got a boost too, with strong hatchery numbers keeping supply high through the rest of 2026.
Pork tells a similar story. Retail pork prices are up a modest 2.3%, and farmers have offset a slight slowdown in hog slaughter by raising animals to heavier weights, keeping shelves stocked. Eggs have actually gotten cheaper than last year, giving shoppers another easy, low-cost protein option. Turkey is the one exception worth watching, since hatchery declines point toward tighter supply and higher prices by fall.
The shift shows up clearly at checkout. Beef sales are up 8% in dollar terms, but the actual number of units sold is down 4%, meaning people are spending more while buying less of it. Tyson Foods reported beef volumes falling as much as 13.1% in its most recent quarter, while chicken volumes rose 1.7%. Skirt steak has become one of the fastest-growing beef cuts of the season, mostly because shoppers are trading down from ribeye and strip steak toward something cheaper that still delivers real beef flavor.
Beef prices got so unpredictable that CME Group just launched a brand new futures contract for beef trim, the fatty scraps ground into hamburgers and meatballs. It works like a stock ticker, but for the meat in your burger. Restaurants and grocery chains use contracts like this to lock in prices ahead of time instead of getting blindsided by another spike. It is Wall Street's plumbing catching up to a supply problem that has been building for years.
There is a broader lesson here too. No app or algorithm can conjure more cattle out of a drought, and no same day delivery service can undo years of ranchers leaving the business. Supply chains for living animals move at the speed of biology, not software, which is exactly why prices have drifted so far from what shoppers expect.
The practical upshot for this weekend is simple. Cheaper beef is not arriving in time for the Fourth of July, and probably not next year either. Chicken thighs, pork chops, a smaller pile of skirt steak, and a table crowded with side dishes are the new normal for the backyard barbecue. The grill still gets fired up. What sits on it just looks a little different now.
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