Heifers, Water, and Grass

Taking stairs down two at a time from the giant stone building, music thrumming in her AirPods. She rounds the corner and her pace slows to a walk. The Commuter Express is still there, leaving the city. Three-tone white and green and blue, blue cloth seats, standing room only, people in suits and dress shoes. Above the windshield, Backlick Three Ninety-Five lit up in yellow.

A twenty-six minute bus ride to the commuter lot. I-95 and then the parkway.

The doors fold shut and then the hiss of air brakes. A young man moves his bag away from the seat next to him, but she reaches up to grab the strap hanging from the ceiling and braces for the turn onto the on-ramp. Eyes forward.

She’s twelve hours in. During the darkest time of the year this is her favorite moment of the day.

As they crest the top of the hill, a glowing river of red on her right. The HOV lane rules say minimum three passengers to get away from the gridlock, and most cars don’t have three. Their brake lights shine as far as she can see, the bus passing them one after another after another.

Next stop, the commuter lot. The bus empties in less than a minute. Her car is close, she parked at five-forty this morning.

On the way home, she stops at the supermarket. Less than ten minutes now to save the peace of a weekend morning with her coffee and the still of the screen porch, cardinals calling from the tree line and squirrels that chitter in the great woods that line the creek.

Vegetables, potatoes, take and bake sourdough. Then the meat counter for some beef. Even the ground is more than seven dollars a pound.

The world has gone mad.

Heifers

Before he can even get a toe to the wood floor she licks his foot. He walks out of the bedroom in the near-dark, and she’s already jogging a circle on the rug next to her food bowl. He puts a scoop in the bowl and hits the coffee grinder button as he walks through the kitchen. She finishes her portion, licks the bowl clean, and still beats him to the door.

While she is outside he goes back to the coffee. Ten after five he hits ‘Brew’ and the coffee maker starts to gurgle.

Out the sunroom window the sky to the east is a deep pink going yellow at the edge. Jesse is back at the screen door, ready for her treat. Red heeler, white Bentley mark on her forehead, nails ticking on the tile when the door swings. She wolfs the treat down in one bite and runs through the house ready to jump on anyone not out of bed yet.

He drinks the coffee with some cream. Only one cup anymore. Jesse is back now; she watches the sparrows flit from tree to tree in the dim light.

He grabs his felt with the cattleman’s crease. By six he’s in the pickup with the window down, diesel turbo whining along the two-track up to the north pasture to check water tanks. The tank on the north end runs off a solar well he put in four years ago, and the float sticks sometimes. Today the float is fine. The grass is not.

He borrowed eleven thousand dollars through a USDA program four years ago to drill that well. For a cattleman, water means grass. It opened up enough ground to add forty pairs on a section that used to just grow sagebrush. He’s looked into what a second one for the east side would cost more than once. Another sixty pairs, maybe, if the grass would carry them.

Imagine walking in to talk to a banker for a loan. Do you have any collateral? Sure do. It’s grass that I’m hoping will survive the drought.

The north pasture is grazed short and has been brown all year. He asks Jesse aloud if they’re going to see any snow this winter. Then the math. How many head, how many acres, how much fuel will cost to truck hay in at more than five dollars a gallon for diesel.

The math says what it said last year. Keeping cattle means losing money.

The pickup idles through and he counts heifer calves. Steers already a check coming regardless. This year’s crop looks good. The kind you want to keep.

He turns the radio up when the cattle market report comes on in the background. Heifer calves bringing between four-fifty and some near four-seventy-five a pound.

He glances through his heifers.

Near four seventy-five a pound means the calves in front of him are twenty-five hundred dollars. Apiece. Or he could lose money to keep them.

Then the news.

The announcer says the United States would import three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef to be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices. The president’s voice says the deal would reduce prices for American families while we work to rebuild the cattle herd and help our ranchers.

He shakes his head and turns the radio back down.

He looks at a heifer calf.

If he keeps her there’s no check in October. She eats hay all winter, and the diesel to deliver it costs more than the hay. Then hope she breeds next summer, lose money again next winter, and then still wait another year.

If. If. If.

If she breeds.

If they get enough snow to grow grass.

If the coyotes don’t find the newborn.

If all that happens, two springs from now she might put her first calf on the ground.

But he still hasn’t made any money. For that to happen that calf would still have to grow, get weaned, and sell for a profit.

This is twenty twenty-six. He could get paid in twenty twenty-eight. Somewhere around twenty-thirty, that calf is beef.

He has a choice and he doesn’t like either option. He could spend money buying hay and paying veterinary bills and hope for luck for four years but that means losing money and a ranch that loses money doesn’t stay a ranch. Or he could put a check for twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket right now but every year he does that his cattle herd shrinks and then makes less and less money every year and the ranch doesn’t stay a ranch.

And the radio just told him the government will do everything it can to make the cattle market no longer profitable.

He spends the rest of the day checking calves and water tanks with Jesse.

Around the time he’s wrapping up he remembers a story his dad told him. His dad loved Reagan, always telling these old stories. 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery store in Houston, Texas. He roamed the aisles of Randall’s, shaking his head in amazement.

He said if ordinary Russians ever saw an American supermarket, “there would be a revolution.”

He wonders what happens to the supermarket if ranchers can’t grow their herds.

They’re headed back for supper. Outside the window the heifer calves are strung out along the creek in the last light, grazing down by the water. They’re worth more money than any calves in the history of this ranch, every one of them a check he can’t afford to cash, and can’t afford not to.

We’ve Been Here Before, But We Were Coming From the Other Direction

Nebraska, 1934.

The Dust Bowl. America was five years into the Depression. Roosevelt had been president a little more than a year. Washington was inventing agencies faster than most people could learn their initials.

None of them could make it rain.

The grass had been gone two years. A rancher couldn’t keep an animal he couldn’t feed, and what he couldn’t keep, nobody wanted to buy. A calf was worth less than the corn it would have taken to fatten it, and the corn wasn’t growing either.

The Drought Relief Service started buying cattle. Not to eat. To get them off land that couldn’t carry them anymore. Four dollars a head for calves, around a hundred dollars today. Ten to twenty for cows and steers, two fifty to five hundred.

More than the packing plants could take. What they couldn’t take, trucks drove to pits we had already dug. Close to one in five of the cattle the government paid for were buried in the ground they’d been trying to graze.

There are two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.

There were ninety-two years between cattle pits in Nebraska and the meat counter in Northern Virginia. Then: not enough grass and water to grow too many cattle. Now: not enough cattle, and not enough grass and water to grow more.

So. Two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.

First, fast. Last week, Washington announced it would import up to three hundred thousand metric tons of foreign ground beef without the usual tariff. A ninety-day supply, priced twenty-five percent below market value.

This isn’t necessarily wicked, a country buying beef. But let’s be honest about what that leaves us with when the ninety days run out. Not an extra acre of grass. Not a foot of pipe for water. Not one bred heifer standing in the snow we are praying for this winter.

And another good question for this approach. Where did that beef come from? A calf that crosses a state line in America has an official tag and a history so USDA can ensure a safe food supply. Born here. Moved there. If it comes from a Western brand state, looked at by a brand inspector before it leaves the state. We know much less about beef imports.

The second way. Slow. Painfully slow. Grass, water, and heifers.

Grass. In August, a Republican from South Dakota and a Democrat from Minnesota introduced a bill to pay landowners to put marginal cropland back into permanent pasture. Up to twenty million acres under ten or fifteen-year contracts. Sunlight turning land into more grass to grow the national cattle herd.

Water. We need more water across the West, and taking more from the Colorado River and aquifers isn’t the solution. If we put marginal crop ground into grazing land, those acres need a fraction of the water draw irrigated row crops need. And the Colorado: a hundred-year-old agreement promised states could take more water than has flowed in the river in decades. Last week, Washington changed those rules. Nevada already sued, arguing that the new decision would leave it with less than half the water it already uses. Nobody’s building a pipeline or a desalination plant by November. No quick solutions, so we better get to work.

Heifers. Somebody has to feed her and take care of her, starting from the fall she isn’t sold to the fall her first calf brings a check two years later. Ask any other American small business the country relies on to skip revenue checks on half of their inventory for two years, and every one of them will go out of business. So ranchers need resources. Low-interest loans and tax credits to keep beef heifers. Marry the credits to the ear tags and brand inspections that already exist, so nobody collects on a heifer that quietly went to market. And put an end date on it. A bridge, not an entitlement. When we rebuild the herd, let it die.

Then comes the hard part. We wait.

The market isn’t broken. The price of calves is real: there aren’t enough of them. Anyone standing in front of a meat case promising lower beef prices by November is making a promise cattle biology doesn’t support.

Cheap beef means abundance. Abundance means more cattle than the market wants to pay for. That’s the market working.

Cheap beef means:

Heifers. Water. Grass.

Sources

U.S. cattle herd at a 75-year low, ground beef averaging $6.69/lb in Dec. 2025, Argentina beef tariff-rate quota raised to 80,000 metric tons: The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ensures Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” Feb. 6, 2026; Federal Register, Proclamation 11010, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer”

Trump executive order removing tariffs on beef, coffee, and tropical fruit, Nov. 14, 2025: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press

NCBA CEO Colin Woodall statement opposing Argentina beef imports: The Center Square, via Yahoo News

DOJ meatpacker price-fixing investigation, Executive Order 14364, Dec. 6, 2025: Wikipedia, “Executive Order 14364”

Nevada v. Department of the Interior, Colorado River Record of Decision lawsuit, Aug. 24, 2026: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, press release

Colorado River Record of Decision and Final EIS, governor statements: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo; Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo

1934 cattle purchase program, packing plants, condemned animals: Wikipedia, “Drought Relief Service”

8.3 million cattle purchased, $111,546,104 cost, 1.5 million condemned: Wikipedia, “Jones–Connally Act 1934”

High Plains aquifer system, southeastern Wyoming extent and use: USGS, Scientific Investigations Map 3180; USGS, Fact Sheet 2011–3106, “Groundwater Quality of Southeastern Wyoming”

Status of the High Plains aquifer in Kansas, 2023: Kansas Geological Survey, Technical Series 25

Ogallala aquifer depletion rates, Texas High Plains: Texas A&M, Ogallala Aquifer Program; Texas Tribune

Irrigated vs. non-irrigated water use, Texas High Plains crop-livestock systems: Zilverberg et al., “Integrated Crop–Livestock Systems in the Texas High Plains: Productivity and Water Use,” 2014

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