When my co-founders and I first started our beef supply chain software company five years ago, we heard the same phrase over and over again: “They’ll never use it.”

A Wyoming family uses clarity, communication and business discipline to build a ranch the next generation wants to come back to.

The U.S., like many countries around the world, is facing a continuous decline in its agricultural workforce. The word transition accurately reflects the concern experienced by many cattle producers, who recognize their production depends heavily on the availability of labor.

Feeding cattle used to be a pen-and-paper business. Feed sheets, herd health records and inventory notes were written in notebooks, on scraps of paper or in binders tucked in barns and pickup trucks. Now more producers are relying on cloud-based software to streamline operations, but hesitation remains, especially if internet access is limited.

Through mid-October 2025, excitement built across the live sectors of the beef industry, with high-price records sometimes being reset daily for many classes of cattle. Though drought conditions persisted through the Great Plains and much of the West, the fundamentals supported rising prices.

For those of you who have been in the cattle production business for any amount of time, you have probably been burned once or twice by a handshake lease deal gone wrong.

Beef producers today are navigating one of the most dynamic environments in recent memory, with many unpredictable variables positioned to influence the next phase of the market cycle.

Calving season is a time for renewed growth and is a product of planning and ensuring the continued growth of the ranch and the cattle industry. You know keeping records is important, but what does that look like at calving time?

A payout-less risk management strategy, like LRP or CME options, offers peace of mind, financial stability and long-term resilience for ranchers, even when premiums aren’t paid out.