The discovery of the New World screwworm fly in the United States this week threatens to further disrupt an already strained cattle business at a time when many ranchers are also struggling with a severe drought.
The U.S. herd is at its lowest level in 75 years, even as consumer demand for beef continues to grow. That has driven live cattle prices — and beef prices — higher, which would normally encourage ranchers to start rebuilding their herds or bring new ranchers into the business. Drought conditions in several states have led to a shortage of grass for grazing, forcing ranchers to sell some of their animals sooner.
“We have a lot of things happening at once,” said David Anderson, a livestock market economist at Texas A&M University.
The average price for a pound of ground beef is $6.90, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up 32 percent from two years ago. Last month, the Department of Agriculture predicted that beef prices would increase by 12.1 percent in 2026.
But back-to-back crises and volatility over the past year have largely prevented ranchers from rebuilding their herds, meaning low cattle supplies and high beef prices are likely to persist.
That cycle “is taking longer than we all want,” Wesley Batista Filho, chief executive of the U.S. business for JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, said on a call with analysts last month.
The latest blow is the discovery of the larvae of the New World screwworm fly in a 3-week-old calf in La Pryor, Texas, about 50 miles from the Mexican border. The fly can lay its eggs in open wounds as small as a tick bite, and the infection can kill animals if left untreated.
The New World screwworm was eradicated from the United States in the 1960s and the rest of North and Central America in the early 2000s. This was done by breeding hundreds of millions of sterile flies each week and dropping them from airplanes into areas where wild flies were found. But eradication efforts have weakened, and since 2022 the fly has been heading north from Panama and closer to the United States.
Before the flies were eradicated, ranchers used steel tongs to remove the larvae and maggots from their animals, but were largely powerless to stop the spread. Older ranchers who dealt with the fly often talk about it in graphic terms.
“I was only a teenager in the mid-50s when I faced this bastard, and when I heard about it again, the nightmares and the horrors it brought back were just unbelievable,” Lee Weathersbee, a rancher and former Del Rio, Texas city councilman, said at an emergency meeting about the screwworm in Del Rio last week.
The Department of Agriculture set up a 12-mile quarantine around the infected calf, installing fly traps and spreading sterile flies from trucks in the area.
“Our responders are already in the area conducting site visits and evaluating the situation to ensure we have the correct information we need to mitigate the spread,” Lewis Dinges, the executive director of the Texas Animal Health Commission, said at a news conference Thursday.
Texas ranchers are stocking up on screwworm treatments and increasing how often they interact with herds. “It’s a small cost we pay to protect a valuable resource,” said Stephen Diebel, president of the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association.
If officials can’t mitigate the spread, the economic impact could be huge. A 2025 Department of Agriculture report estimated that a widespread outbreak could lead to a loss of $732 million to Texas ranchers and $1.8 billion to the state economy.
“The real key is how long it lasts,” said economist Mr. Anderson. “If this is a long-term sustained outbreak, it will be very difficult for some ranchers to survive financially.”
The roundworm has been found in tens of thousands of animals in Mexico and Central America over the past 18 months and has even killed 10 people, according to the Department of Agriculture. Last May, the department banned imports of live cattle from Mexico, which has already increased the price of beef.
Typically, about 15 percent of Texas’ feeder cattle — young weaned cattle ready to begin fattening for slaughter — come from Mexico. But with the border closed to Mexican cattle, a large feedlot in Lubbock, Texas, went out of business this year because it couldn’t get enough of the animals.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said Thursday that there was “no question” that closing the border to Mexican cattle had caused higher beef prices. “We’re obviously very focused on affordability,” she said. “But the president agreed when we briefed him that we needed to keep our livestock producers as safe as possible.”
With only two confirmed cases in the United States, the screwworm is more of a potential problem for ranchers, but the fallout from a severe drought is more pressing.
A snowless winter across the West has led to a lack of grass for the cattle to eat and not enough readily available water for them to drink. The Department of Agriculture says 57 percent of the nation’s cattle are in areas experiencing drought, a problem exacerbated by spring wildfires that burned more than a million acres.
At Wyoming’s largest cattle market, more than 9,000 cattle were sold in one week last month. Normally at that time of year the market would sell fewer than 1,000.
Additional sales may temporarily lower beef prices, but in the long term will raise them by reducing the supply of cattle.
“Everybody’s just in survival mode,” said Jay Nordhausen, the owner of the Ogallala Livestock Auction Market in Nebraska. He has sold 15,000 more cattle than he did this time last year and expects a busy summer selling animals that in a typical year wouldn’t go to market until the fall. “It’s pretty grim around here, I’m just trying to get by,” he said.
Many ranchers simply don’t have enough grass for their cattle to graze on, or are concerned that overgrazing will degrade soil health and lead to long-term damage. While ranchers can supplement grass by giving their cattle forage, such as hay, it also has its challenges. Some areas do not have enough hay, and many farms are not equipped to receive and distribute large quantities of hay. It has also increased in price, making it less economical.
Calves are usually born in the spring and weaned from their mothers in the fall. This is when ranchers make decisions about how many heifers and cows to keep and how many to sell at market. But some farmers are now weaning calves earlier to reduce the mother cow’s need for nutrients, or are considering selling cow-calf pairs early.
“No one wants to expand the herd more than our producers,” said Brian Winter, whose family operates cattle markets across four states. “But you are physically limited by feed conditions.”
