Madison County Stays Loyal To Its Ranching Roots
Published Jan 24, 2008
Cattle outnumber people in Madison County by a ratio of about 5-to-1.
Madison County has a lot to beef about. The 472-square-mile county in east central Texas has only about 12,000 human residents. But today it has about 55,000 head of cattle and calves – historic levels that mean cattle outnumber folks by about five to one.
That’s a good chunk of the total inventory of Texas cattle which, including calves and bulls, totaled nearly 14 million head as of January 2005, leading the nation with 14 percent of total United States inventory.
Those cattle are worth an estimated $8.4 billion to Texas, and traditional ranching has always been the biggest business in Madison County, located 100 miles northwest of Houston. In 1930 the county had only about 10,000 cattle. Twenty years later it reached a high of more than 54,000 – about the same as today.
The county has 750 individual producers on 303,000 acres; however, Madison County is seeing a trend of fragmentation – large land tracts being broken up into smaller ranchettes, county extension agent Brian Rigsby said.
“The price of beef and cows are pretty high, and folks are building inventory so they can increase their production,” he says. “But that’s about as high as it will get. Given the amount of grazing land, that’s about all we can have.”
By late 2005, producers – many of them family ranchers – were getting peak prices for commercial cattle, which are mixed breeds that can with stand high summer temperatures and are the workhorse of the beef industry.
The high costs of diesel fuel and fertilizer have been cutting into ranchers’ profits but, given the continued popularity of high-protein diets, it’s highly likely demand for beef cattle will continue as long as Madison County keeps raising them.
Story by Jeanne A. Naujeck
Photo by Stephen Cherry
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