Blog Details

The national herd is rebuilding. That’s the headline version.

The producers I’m talking to across western Queensland and the Riverina are telling me something more complicated. Yes, the herd numbers are improving from the drought-driven destocking lows. But the cost of getting back to full production — the inputs, the freight, the labour — has reset at a level that makes the maths look very different to 2019, when the same operation was running comfortably in the black.

Let’s go through it.

Cattle prices

The Eastern Young Cattle Indicator has been under pressure since its peak years. After record highs around 1,400+ cents per kilogram carcase weight in the post-drought restocking surge, we’ve come back to earth considerably. That correction was always coming — anyone who told you those prices were the new normal either didn’t understand the cycle or was trying to sell you something.

Where we are now is still, by historical standards, a reasonable market. But “reasonable” doesn’t feel like much when your input costs have risen 30-40% over the same period. The real return per animal has compressed significantly for a lot of producers. Meat & Livestock Australia’s own data makes this clear even without drilling into enterprise-level numbers.

I think we’re in a period of price consolidation for the next twelve to eighteen months, with the upside capped by global protein competition and the downside supported by continued demand from Asia — particularly from Southeast Asian markets where Australian beef maintains a strong premium position.

The season

This is where it gets genuinely complex. The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting a near-neutral ENSO going into the back half of 2026 after a period of La Niña-influenced conditions. What that means practically varies enormously depending on where you are. The northern channel country could have another reasonable wet season. The Murray-Darling Basin catchment is a different story — water allocations have been tightening, and the politics around water policy hasn’t gotten any cleaner or more predictable.

For cropping operations in the southern half of the country, the outlook is cautiously okay. For the producers running cattle in the semi-arid fringe who just restocked — they’re watching the sky every morning the same way producers always have. Weather intelligence is not a solved problem, and anyone who tells you a forecast twelve months out is reliable is selling you confidence, not science.

This is partly why we’ve invested in weather intelligence as a data layer within REALM’s market radar — not because we’ve solved the forecast problem, but because integrating weather data with price data and freight data gives you a more complete picture than any of those signals in isolation.

Freight and input costs

This is the one that doesn’t get enough airplay in the mainstream ag media. Freight rates on east-west routes have been running at elevated levels compared to pre-pandemic baselines. Some of that has normalised. Not all of it. And for producers who are moving product long distances — which is most of the inland livestock producers in this country — freight is not a rounding error. It’s a margin question.

The labour piece is similarly under-discussed. Seasonal labour availability has improved from the catastrophic lows of the COVID travel restriction years, but the structural problem of an ageing workforce in regional agriculture hasn’t been solved. It’s been papered over by slightly better visa conditions and an influx of workers who may or may not still be here in 2028.

Succession

This one keeps coming up every time I’m in a room with producers over fifty. The succession question — what happens to this operation when I’m gone — is driving a lot of quiet decision-making that isn’t visible in the aggregate data but shows up clearly in land transaction patterns and in the mood at events like AgForce conferences.

ABARES has written about the demographic shift. It’s real. A significant proportion of Australian agricultural land is held by people over sixty with no clear succession plan. That’s partly a risk for the sector. It’s also an opportunity — for the aggregators, for the next generation of producers, and for the platforms that can help facilitate those transitions efficiently.

What I think matters most in 2026

Integration. Not just technology integration — though that too. I mean the integration of data, relationships, and capital in ways that make individual farming operations genuinely more resilient.

The producers who come through the next five years in the strongest position won’t necessarily be the biggest. They’ll be the ones who’ve built the best information systems around their operations — who know their cost per kilogram of gain, who have visibility on freight before they’ve committed to a sale, who understand their weather risk and have at least thought about how to hedge it.

That’s not a sales pitch for REALM. It’s just what I see when I look at who’s surviving and who isn’t.

Come and talk about it in the REALM360 community. We’re building the space for exactly these conversations.

— Robbie