The Broken Math Keeping Young Ranchers Out

I've been wrestling with something lately, and I'm not the only one. Beef prices are at record highs. It's all over the headlines. Yet the young people I meet who want to get into ranching? They can't make the numbers work. And the older ranchers I know can't find anyone to take over when they're ready to quit.

We talk about supporting local farms, yet we've built an economy where the only people who can afford ranch land are the ones who don't need to make a living from it. This is a crisis hiding in plain sight.

For generations, there was a rough equation that held true: a few years of production on a piece of ground matched what you paid for it. Land and cattle prices moved together. That's how farm families built equity. How a young couple could scrape together a down payment and work their way into ownership. How kids took over operations from their parents.

Farmer Andrea moving our cattle to fresh pasture on this fall morning.

Joel Salatin, a farmer and writer who's been at this for decades in Virginia, shared an example recently that's been stuck in my head. His parents bought pastureland in 1961 for $90 an acre. At the time, calves were selling for about $180, and you figured five acres to run a cow-calf pair. That works out to about $35 an acre per year. Three years of raising cattle, and you'd matched what you paid for the ground.

Today, that same land goes for $9,000 an acre. Calves fetch around $2,000, a "record" price. Yet now it takes over 20 years of production to match the land value.

Calf prices went up 10x. Land went up 100x.

The ladder got pulled up. And we're running out of time to build a new one.

If a young rancher can't buy land with cattle money, who's buying it? And what happens to these landscapes when ranching families aren't the ones stewarding them?

Here's what gives me hope, even as it keeps me up at night. A few older ranchers are trying something radical: instead of cashing out at top dollar when they retire, they're leaving money on the table to give the next generation a fighting chance. Structuring deals that prioritize continuity over maximum return. Betting on people instead of portfolios.

It's remarkable. It's also fragile. We're essentially asking one generation to subsidize the broken math we've all inherited.

That can't be the only answer. Maybe it's a start, though. Proof that some people still believe the land matters more than the last dollar you can squeeze from it. And maybe, if enough of us build something different as eaters, as farmers, as neighbors, we can start to rewrite the equation before it's too late.

If you've seen someone doing this right, whether it's a creative land deal, a young farmer who found a way in, or a community that figured something out, I want to hear about it. Hit reply. These are the sparks we need to build something new.

Your farmer (stubborn enough to think we can fix this),
Cody