The beef industry is no stranger to creating problems and promoting things that come back to hurt the industry. See how they actively try to downplay beef’s green house emissions and that beef and meat consumption needs to go down for climate change. Climate change has then in turn lead to drought that has reduced ability to raise cattle

The US beef industry is creating an army of influencers and citizen activists to help amplify a message that will be key to its future success: that you shouldn’t be too worried about the growing attention around the environmental impacts of its production.

In particular, it would like you not to be especially concerned about how meat consumption needs to be reduced if we are to avoid the most violently disruptive forms of planetary heating (even if all fossil fuel use ended tomorrow).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

much of the U.S. faced a drought for much of 2020-2023. This made it more difficult to grow the plants and food that are used to feed cattle; as a result, cattle feed prices rose during that time, and many cattle farmers opted to either reduce or simply not increase their herd size in response to what was effectively an increase in their input costs.

Although drought is a naturally occurring phenomenon, it’s also exacerbated by global warming. This is relevant because beef production itself is a significant driver of global warming, due to the massive amounts of land used for feed crops and pasture, as well as the methane cattle emit as part of their digestive process.

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All of this is as ironic as it is unsustainable: The process of raising cattle for beef is, itself, making it more difficult to raise cattle for beef.

https://sentientmedia.org/higher-beef-prices-arent-good-news-for-climate-change/