“That was naturally going to bring down the price,” he said. “You get these sort of cattle cycles where the price shoots up and gives everyone an incentive to rebuild. But when you rebuild, there’s a two-year lag before everyone brings animals to the market and you can kind of have an overreaction. Also, you had an exchange rate that gave the U.S. the ability to buy international beef for cheaper.”

In the past 50 years, there have been three big price spikes. However, in the first two, prices dropped rapidly due to external factors such as hyperinflation or fluctuating oil prices.

“We had none of those factors this year but they’ve come down just as quickly,” Belasco said. “But a lot of this is driven by domestic demand for beef and domestic supply. Especially if you are in Montana, you had a lot of ranchers in Texas who were deficient in the amount they were producing. We had favorable conditions. You had the northern plains region all expanding their herds, which kind of makes sense.”

When prices were high, a lot of ranchers probably spent the extra money to pay off debt, make repairs on equipment that they’d been putting off for years, or upgraded tractors. Not a lot of them were able to squirrel away a huge nest egg to prepare for a dip like this, according to Belasco.