The Honest Cattle Market Index (HCMI), 2020–2026: Six Years of Results
The full Honest Cattle Market Index (HCMI) series back to 2020 — a 3x climb from the post-COVID low to 149.5 — with its four components and every data source.
What Ranchers Can Actually Win on Their Data
Honest Cattle Research Series — Data & Policy Ownership is the wrong fight — the law won’t grant it and it wouldn’t help if it did. Access, portability, and consent are winnable, through levers ranchers already hold. A practical ladder, from what you can do this week to what would take an act of Congress. […]
High Calf Prices Leverage is Perishable
Record prices are a windfall every producer shares. Leverage is what lets you capture more than the average — and keep capturing it after the windfall ends. A field guide to converting a cyclical top into durable structural advantage, written for Montana and Northern Plains cow-calf producers. 📅 June 24, 2026 ✍️ By Dirk Adams, […]
The Montana Cattle Index
A public, reproducible, rancher-facing weekly benchmark of Montana and Northern Plains cattle-market conditions — the Honest Cattle Market Index (HCMI). What it is, why we built it, and how to read it.
Read Your Own Ground: A Rancher’s Guide to the Rangeland Analysis Platform (RAP)
A plain-English Honest Cattle guide to checking your ranch’s range condition and 20-year trend for free on rangelands.app (RAP): how to set your boundary (including from Montana Cadastral), run the cover and production analysis, and read the results in ranching terms.
County-Scale Rangeland Forage Scores Without Pasture Visits
Honest Cattle Research Series — Range Conditions County-Scale Rangeland Forage Scores Without Pasture Visits On this page Executive Summary Key Findings at a Glance The Method Honest Cattle Is Using on the Website Why This Approach Is Scientifically Credible Why Snowpack Alone Is Not Enough What the Score Can and Cannot Tell a Producer Model […]
Montana Brand Owners by County — MDOL Online Brand Book
The Montana Department of Livestock maintains a real-time searchable brand book covering 51,000+ registered brands, filterable by all 56 counties. Direct link, how-to guide, and notes on data access.
Getting Paid for What You Shipped: The Calf Weight Problem
The price slide that once protected Montana ranchers from weight misses in direct calf sales has largely disappeared — replaced by a status quo where the seller absorbs the full cost. Here’s how each approach works, who’s doing it right, and a draft contract with a slide for ranchers who want to ask for one.
From Grid to Gate: How Cattle Futures Carry Grid Economics Back to Montana Calf Bids
Grid pricing operates on a weekly cycle — base from last week’s cash, premiums from this week’s cutout. So how does it influence Montana calf bids 5–9 months out? Through feedlot forward projection against three CME contracts: LE (live cattle), GF (feeder cattle), and ZC (corn). This paper walks the predictive chain at three time horizons and explains why the Quarterly Forecast bands are the right answer at the long end. Prepared with the assistance of AI.
Captive on Arrival: How Far We Can Trace Montana’s Cattle Through the Captivity Tiers
Applying the FAT four-tier captive framework to Montana’s 2023 out-of-state flows: of 990,376 head, public data lets us tier-classify only 31%. In the two well-mapped destinations (Nebraska and Kansas), about 30% of inbound Montana cattle land in ownership- or geographic-captive yards. The other 69% disappears into a destination-state data gap that is itself the finding. Prepared with the assistance of AI.