The first county-by-county view of brand-inspected cattle movement, built from a public-records release by the Montana Department of Livestock — with the assistance of AI.

In March 2026, the Montana Department of Livestock released brand-inspection records for calendar year 2023 in response to a Honest Cattle public-records request. The file contains every BE-10 inspection — the change-of-ownership and interstate-movement record that all Montana cattle pass through — for the entire year: 39,003 lots, 1,664,873 head, every inspection county and every destination state.

It is, as far as we have been able to confirm, the first time this information has been released to the public at this granularity.

This post is the statewide overview. Every county page on Honest Cattle now carries its own 2023 movement appendix built from the same dataset.

The headline number

60.8% of inspected Montana cattle left the state in 2023. Montana inspected 1.66 million head; 1.01 million of them shipped to a buyer outside Montana. Only 652,000 stayed inside the state line.

That ratio is not an accident — it’s the structural shape of Montana cattle production. Montana has the calf-and-yearling country; Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and the rest of the Corn Belt have the feedyards. The brand inspections show the handoff in unprecedented detail.

Top destinations

Three flow corridors stand out:

• Corn Belt feeding (NE + SD + IA + MN + KS): 571,000 head, or 34% of the total. This is the canonical Montana-feeder-cattle story.
• Pacific Northwest (WA + ID + OR): 152,000 head. A smaller corridor, but a real one — concentrated in the western Montana valleys.
• Canadian shipments (AB + BC + SK): 42,000+ head. Mostly Alberta, mostly out of Judith Basin and the high-line counties.

The October pulse

If you want to know when Montana ranchers ship, the answer is October.

October alone moved 28% of the entire 2023 inspection volume. October and November combined moved 43%. Add September and the three-month fall window moves 54% of all annual head.

The May/June bump is in-state grass turnout — those months are 35–37% out-of-state, the lowest ratio of the year. By contrast, September is 78% out-of-state. When ranchers are shipping, they’re shipping east.

County weight

Ten counties account for the lion’s share of statewide volume:

1. Yellowstone — 123,344 head
2. Beaverhead — 107,787
3. Custer — 78,913
4. Judith Basin — 76,722
5. Carter — 71,140
6. Carbon — 69,855
7. Powder River — 64,812
8. Big Horn — 62,580
9. Teton — 56,921
10. Fergus — 53,918

The eastern feeder belt — Custer, Carter, Powder River, Fallon, Garfield, Rosebud — ships almost entirely east. Carter County is 88.9% out-of-state, with South Dakota taking 37,851 head all by itself. Powder River County is 87.0% out-of-state. Big Horn ships 36% of its volume directly into Wyoming feedlots.

Western counties have a different profile. Beaverhead’s #1 destination is Idaho. Yellowstone’s #1 is Washington. Glacier County, sitting on the Alberta border, keeps 71% of its inspected cattle inside Montana.

Reading the county numbers: auction yards matter

One nuance worth flagging before anyone over-reads the county rankings: the FOIA workbook records the inspection county, not the county the cattle were actually raised in. Brand inspectors mostly work at points of sale and shipping — auction yards, video-auction collection points, and large feedlots — so a county that hosts a major auction yard will appear large in the rankings even if comparatively few of its inspected cattle were born or grazed inside its boundaries.

Yellowstone County is the most visible example. The county shows up as Montana’s #1 county of inspection at 123,344 head in 2023 — but Yellowstone is Billings. Most of those cattle moved through the two big auction yards there: Billings Livestock Commission (BLS) and Public Auction Yards (PAYS). Yellowstone County’s economy is overwhelmingly service industry, livestock equipment and ranching supply — not primary cow-calf production. When you see Yellowstone at the top, read it as where Montana cattle were sold and shipped, not where they were raised.

Other counties whose totals carry an auction-yard premium include Cascade (Great Falls), Custer (Miles City Livestock), Gallatin (Headwaters Livestock at Three Forks), Missoula (Western Montana Stockyards), Dawson (Glendive) and Valley (Glasgow). Counties without a major yard — Carter, Powder River, Garfield, Petroleum — are far closer to a true read of where cattle were born and grazed.

The Department of Livestock data does not include the originating ranch on each inspection, so we can’t fully resolve the auction-yard distortion from this dataset alone. It is a real and known feature of brand-inspection data and should be kept in mind whenever inspection counties get treated as production counties.

What this is and isn’t

A few honest caveats before anyone reads too much into a single year’s snapshot:

• BE-10 inspections measure transactions and movements, not standing inventory. A single steer can appear twice if it’s sold and then re-shipped across state lines.
• “Destination state” is the buyer’s address of record, not necessarily the final feedlot.
• 2023 is one calendar year. We’ve requested 2022 data from MT DOL and they have confirmed it’s coming. With two years in hand we’ll be able to talk about year-over-year movement patterns rather than a single snapshot.

Where to read more

Every Montana county page on honestcattle.net now carries a 2023 movement appendix below the main body — top destinations, monthly head, and the percentage that shipped out of state. They’re all built from this same dataset.

A few worth starting with:

• Carter County — the most export-heavy county in the state.
• Beaverhead County — Idaho-facing flow.
• Judith Basin County — the Alberta corridor.
• Yellowstone County — biggest single-county volume in the state.

Methodology: figures are derived from MT Department of Livestock BE-10 brand-inspection records, calendar year 2023, released to Honest Cattle under public-records request in March 2026. The source workbook contains 39,003 inspection rows across two systems (Fort Supply legacy + ServiceNow current); both were normalized and combined for analysis. Cattle (BE-10) inspections only — horse and bison records excluded. Data prepared with the assistance of AI; the underlying records are the Department’s.