BREAKING: USDA NASS to Bring Back July Cattle Inventory Report in 2025

Less than a year after USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced it was nixing a major cattle inventory report, the agency now says it’s bringing it back. USDA-NASS announced on Wednesday the July Cattle Inventory report will be reinstated this year, which will provide a mid-year check of the size of the U.S. cattle herd at a time when supplies are critically low.

In April 2024 NASS broke the news that due to budget cuts in the appropriations bill, the agency was forced to discontinue several reports. One of those was the July Cattle Inventory report. And at a time when cattle supplies were historically tight, that announcement drew intense criticism from market analysts.

“We recognize the importance of these critical data releases and made it a priority to find a way to restore them,” Lance Honig, who’s the Chair of the Agricultural Statistics Board for USDA-NASS, told Farm Journal after the announcement on Wednesday. “All data are important, but the current situation in the cattle industry makes the mid-year inventory update that the July Cattle report provides invaluable.”

There was a hint that the mid-year cattle report would make a comeback when USDA-NASS released the January Cattle Inventory report earlier this year. The report was released as a biannual report, but NASS wasn’t able to confirm that the July report would indeed be back this year.