CattleFax: The Beef Industry's Member-Owned Market Intelligence Service
CattleFax is a member-owned market information and research organisation based in Centennial, Colorado, that has served the United States cattle and beef industry since 1968. Its website is cattlefax.com. CattleFax collects, analyses and distributes the data producers need to market cattle profitably—prices, supplies, demand, feed and grain costs, weather and trade—and it does so as an information service owned by the industry it serves rather than as a participant in the market itself.
The organisation's own summary is concise: for more than fifty years its focus has been information on, by and for the beef industry, and its exclusive industry database has set the standard for market information and analysis. Its tagline calls it the deciding factor. That positioning—trusted, neutral analysis for people who buy and sell cattle in a volatile market—has made CattleFax one of the most quoted sources in American agricultural media, and a fixture of the annual CattleCon convention, where its outlook seminar draws producers from across the country.
Overview
CattleFax serves producers in all segments of the cattle and beef business: cow-calf operators, stockers, cattle feeders and the packers and allied businesses around them, as well as financial institutions that lend to and invest in the sector. It describes itself as a global leader in beef industry research, analysis and information, while emphasising that it is not a stakeholder in the market—it does not trade cattle, so its analysis is designed solely to meet the industry's information needs.
The organisation is headquartered in Centennial, in the Denver metropolitan area of Colorado, a state with deep cattle-feeding and ranching roots. Its staff of analysts—numbering in the dozens—turns a private database built over decades into outlooks, price reporting and decision tools for members.
History and Founding
CattleFax was started in 1968 by cattle producers who believed their negotiating position needed improvement. Chief executive Randy Blach has explained that producers at the time were not fully comfortable that the information and data they received from government were accurate, and they felt buyers and packers held an information advantage: a small number of packers controlled the great majority of the industry, a structure that has persisted in various forms. The answer was a self-help system—progressive cattlemen pooling resources to collect, analyse and distribute information for better marketing and business decisions.
That founding logic still defines the organisation. Input from a board of directors and a membership-driven focus were important from the beginning, with producers in the cow-calf sector particularly concerned with the calf crop, marketing and understanding the market cycle. Over time the organisation built what it describes as the largest private database in the country for cattle market information, and its database became the industry's reference standard.
Ownership and Governance
CattleFax is member-owned, and that ownership is central to its credibility. The producers and businesses who rely on its numbers are, collectively, its owners; a board of directors drawn from the membership guides it, and past presidents such as Todd Allen, the 2017-18 president, have described how heavily membership-driven the organisation was from its early days.
Because members fund the service, CattleFax's incentives differ from those of a data vendor selling to the highest bidder or a trader profiting from market moves. Its public materials stress that it is not a stakeholder in the market: it neither gains nor loses when prices move, which supports its role as a neutral analyst whose outlooks are quoted by producer organisations, universities and trade media alike.
Leadership and Analysts
Randy Blach is CattleFax's chief executive officer and its best-known voice. His tenure is itself a measure of the organisation's continuity: at the 2026 outlook seminar he noted it was his forty-fifth year at CattleFax, a span covering the demand collapse of the 1980s and 1990s through to the record demand of the mid-2020s. Blach typically closes the annual outlook presentations, putting the team's analysis into overall perspective for producers.
Around him sits a team of specialist analysts who appear regularly in industry media. Mike Murphy serves as chief operating officer and presents the overall market situation; Kevin Good, vice president of market analysis, reports on cattle inventories and supply; analysts including Troy Applehans, Matthew McQuagge and Joseph Vasseur provide market wrap-ups and commentary on cattle, corn, soybean and wheat markets; and Matt Makens serves as the organisation's atmospheric scientist, presenting weather outlooks that producers use for grazing and feeding decisions.
Services and Information Products
CattleFax's core service is market analysis delivered to members: ongoing reporting and interpretation of cattle, beef, grain, energy and protein markets, built on its exclusive database. Although beef is the centre, the organisation is also an industry leader in research and analysis for grains and for other proteins including pork and poultry, and for trade—because a cattle feeder's margins depend as much on corn prices, competing proteins and export demand as on cattle prices themselves.
Delivery takes several forms: regular market updates and wrap-ups from its analysts, published outlook material, webinars—its webinar series had reached more than 1,500 producers by the mid-2010s—and live outlook meetings hosted with state and regional cattlemen's organisations, at which Blach and colleagues present the cattle and beef outlook directly to producers. Membership is the gateway: producers join CattleFax to receive the information flow and can engage analysts whose specialisation matches their segment.
The CattleFax Outlook
The organisation's most public product is its annual outlook, presented at the CattleFax Outlook Seminar during CattleCon, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association convention. The seminar is consistently among the convention's best-attended sessions, and its forecasts—for fed cattle, feeder cattle and calf prices, beef production, trade and per-capita supplies—are reported across the agricultural press each year.
The February 2026 outlook illustrates the format and the substance. The team characterised the United States industry as entering 2026 with strong but volatile conditions: historically tight cattle supplies, with inventories at a seventy-five-year low and the beef cow herd down by roughly 285,000 head; record-setting beef demand; and elevated policy and weather uncertainty supporting prices near cyclical highs. Analysts projected fed slaughter declines, historically tight non-fed slaughter, imports up and exports down, and a slow, measured herd expansion rather than a rapid rebuild, constrained by drought, pasture conditions, input costs and producer demographics. Blach reminded producers that demand growth had been worth more than a thousand dollars per head in value, while cautioning against complacency in volatile markets.
Clients and Industry Partners
CattleFax's clients are its members: cattle producers in every segment, allied industry partners such as animal health, feed and equipment companies that serve producers, and financial institutions that need independent beef analysis. Long-standing member families describe trusting the service for more than forty years—California and Colorado ranching families quoted at the fiftieth anniversary said CattleFax information had underpinned their marketing since the 1960s and 1970s.
Its partners in the industry's institutional life include the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, whose CattleCon hosts the outlook seminar; state associations such as the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association and the Colorado Livestock Association, which host outlook meetings and webinars; and university programmes, whose leaders cite CattleFax as the organisation that taught the industry to turn data into information.
Coverage Areas
CattleFax's coverage is the United States cattle industry nationally, with analysis segmented by the regions that structure the trade—including the Northern and Southern fed cattle markets, whose seasonal price spreads its analysts track. Its outlooks also incorporate international dimensions: import and export flows, including feeder cattle movement from Mexico, and global beef demand, reflecting its description as a global leader in beef research.
From its Centennial base, the organisation's analysts travel the cattle country circuit of conventions, association meetings and outlook sessions, and its commentary reaches producers everywhere through agricultural radio networks, farm publications and digital channels that syndicate its market reporting.
Digital Platforms
CattleFax's website, cattlefax.com, is the membership and information hub: it presents the organisation's services, outlook material and routes for producers to join and access analysis. Its analysts' regular market wrap-ups circulate as online video and audio through industry platforms and social channels, including its professional following on LinkedIn, where the company summarises its fifty-year database heritage for prospective members and partners.
Digital delivery has extended the founding mission. What began in 1968 as pooled data shared among producer-members now moves as webinars, streamed convention presentations and same-day market commentary—faster, but recognisably the same self-help information system the founders designed.
Notable Work
CattleFax's fiftieth anniversary in 2018 prompted industry-wide reflection on its contribution. University of Nebraska agribusiness leader Tom Field summarised it: an organisation that has taken data and turned it into information. The anniversary coverage documented the scale of what the member-owned model had built—a half-century database, a standard-setting analysis practice, and a producer community that had relied on it across two generations of family operations.
Its annual outlooks function as a shared reference point for the entire sector: packers, feeders, cow-calf producers, lenders and journalists all argue from, and sometimes against, the numbers CattleFax publishes each winter, which is the practical definition of an industry standard.
Recent Developments
CattleFax's 2026 outlook work shows the organisation analysing one of the tightest supply situations in its history: the smallest cattle inventory in seventy-five years, record prices and demand, packing margins under historic pressure, and questions about how quickly the herd can rebuild. Its analysts' warnings about wholesale demand moderation and its attention to beef-on-dairy production and heavier carcass weights illustrate how the research agenda keeps expanding beyond head counts to the structure of modern beef supply.
Nearly six decades after a group of cattlemen decided they needed their own numbers, CattleFax remains member-owned, Colorado-based and focused on a single trade. In an industry where information asymmetry was the founding grievance, that continuity—information on, by and for the beef industry—is precisely the point.
