An economic analysis of the registered beef cattle industry of South Texas

This dissertation reports an economic analysis of the beef cattle industry of South Texas with emphasis on operations producing registered cattle. Investment, costs, returns and management information were obtained from registered cattle breeders in the South Texas area. Representative ranch budgets were constructed from the data for five sizes of ranch operations. The investment and cost information included in the representative ranch budgets was used to estimate investment and cost aspects on registered cattle rancher within the study area and within the given size range of the representative budgets. The lowest investments and costs per animal unit, as explained by the derived equations, generally occurred on ranches having a size of about 750 to 1,000 animal units. ...