At the Saturday Barton Creek Farmers Market in Austin, Texas, Richardson Farms’ booth is tucked into the far back corner. There’s a long line of customers here to buy meat and dairy.

“We raise beef, we raise pork. We do eggs and chicken. We have milk and we have cheese that we make,” said Jim Richardson, who owns the farm.

He talked under his tent while his grandson fetched items from the many coolers at the booth. There were lots of requests for beef — stew meat, steak, and ground beef. And lately, Richardson has had to raise prices.

“I went up roughly a dollar a pound,” he said. “My processor went up that much or more. So, without kind of keeping up, it erodes your profitability.”

Beef prices in the U.S. have been climbing for months and are now at record highs. The costs haven’t kept customers from buying beef, however.

Richardson has worked with cattle as a rancher and a veterinarian for more than fifty years. He says it’s unusual for prices to stay this high for this long. He’s not sure when they’ll come down again, but he doesn’t think it will be soon.

“I’d say it’s going to be years. It’s a real complex issue and it’s not going to remedy quickly,” Richardson said.

There are a number of factors contributing to the high prices, including tariffs on Brazilian imports, and a USDA ban on Mexican cattle due to a parasitic fly infecting cattle across the border.

Another major reason is the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest it’s been since the 1950s. Years of drought in cattle country have made it harder to feed the cows, and many ranchers have been forced to sell their animals. As the cattle population declines, each cow becomes worth more. That higher sticker price further incentivizes producers to sell. 

“And that means then that we don’t grow the herd. And that’s the situation we’ve been in here for a while,” said Brenda Boetel, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

She doesn’t see beef prices dropping any time soon.

“When I’m talking year-over-year, I don’t really see that declining at least through ’26,” Boetel said. 

Still, consumer demand is not declining either. Boetel said she’s surprised at how resilient beef demand has remained through rising prices.

Three Six General, a small butcher shop and grocery store in San Marcos, south of Austin, is crammed with display cases of cheese and proteins, plus coolers lining the walls with veggies, sausage, and chicken feet. In the back, workers marinate ribs, cut sheets of butcher paper, and grind black pepper.

Owner Matti Bills is conscious of her prices.

“I used to be really afraid to price things appropriately, because everything seemed so expensive to me already,” she said. “And my accountant was like ‘Matti you need to work on your cost of goods sold.’”

Bills still sells plenty of beef though — with cuts like ribeye, tenderloin, Denver, and strip.

Bills mostly buys from local ranchers, which she says helps keep prices down. But she still has to be strategic about what she stocks.

“Maybe we decided to stop selling a certain cut because it was so expensive or we added another cheaper cut and we started looking, you know, for something that would be more affordable just so we could keep that price point in the case,” she said.

But ultimately, those higher costs get passed on to her customers.