Texas is easily the largest cattle state in the country, with 12.3 million head, or nearly one of every seven head in the U.S. inventory of 93.6 million cattle. The 54 Texas counties declared a disaster area due to damage by Hurricane Harvey hold 1.2 million beef cows, the animals that are the foundation of the cattle industry, says livestock economist David Anderson of Texas A&M.
“That’s 27 percent of the state’s cow herd,” said Anderson, and it’s probably a conservative estimate. Besides the cows, ranchers in the disaster area held a lot of calves that were close to marketing age and weight when Harvey hit over the weekend. The disaster area includes a large number of livestock auction markets and a meat processing plant, said Texas A&M AgriLife Communications.
Cattle futures rose by as much as 2.6 percent, to their highest level in nearly three weeks, at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, reports Bloomberg. A spokesman for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association told the news agency that flooding was expected to significantly affect ranchers outside of Corpus Christi and Houston: “We suspect there are going to be lots of fences down, lots of cattle out and lots of work to be done to rebuild the infrastructure and recover those animals.”
“Farmers and livestock producers in eastern Texas are still getting heavy rains Monday in areas flooded over the weekend when Hurricane Harvey made landfall,” said DTN. “Producers and others on social media posted videos and photos throughout the weekend of cattle wading through the water, or the center of town, and crops destroyed by the rain.”