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Economist says dairy replacement heifer pipeline is shrinking

An economist says milk production is going up, but the replacement herd is shrinking.

Danny Munch with the American Farm Bureau Federation has been tracking the number of milk cows, replacement heifers, and culling rates.  He tells Brownfield that dairy farmers are heavily utilizing beef genetics in their herd management plans to take advantage of beef cross premiums. “And that sort of changed how dairy farmers respond to signals in the milk market, in a way that they’re really not responding to signals in the milk market as much.”

Munch says the U.S. has the highest milk cow inventory since the 1990s at 9.57 million head as of November, with the lowest number of replacement heifers since 1978. “We’re going to have some sort of point where these older cows, depending on how the markets respond, it might be more gradual, it might be more sharp, but you’re going to have to breed some of these milk cows to increase replacements to in order to have any sort of improvements to the future milk supply.”

Munch says the first fifty weeks of 2025 had the lowest cull rates in dairy cows in more than a decade. “All of these statistics are accumulating into sort of a system that’s more responsive to the beef sector than it is to dairy, so we have record milk production right now in the United States, record milk production globally, and that’s weighed heavily on dairy prices.”

Munch says all of this leads to an expected drop in dairy product receipts for 2026.

AUDIO: Danny Munch discusses his research into dairy replacement heifers with Brownfield’s Larry Lee