If you’re a dairy producer looking to purchase replacement heifers, you know prices have gone sky high. It’s a simple supply and demand imbalance. Supply is limited and demand has been moving higher with improved milk margins, which are now the best in a decade.

Early last summer, purchasing heifers was an exercise in buyer’s choice at $1,600 to $1,700 per head, according to USDA and field data. Just one year later, values have moved past $3,000 per head for Holsteins at recent auctions in Turlock, Calif., and Pipestone, Minn., with top heifers fetching $3,800.

There’s good reason for those high values as replacement numbers have dropped to a 20-year low due to the beef on dairy trend and that is inhibiting growth in milk production. These high replacement costs have caused dairy farmers to collectively pull way back on culling.

A 469,400 head shift

When comparing the first nine months of this year to one year earlier, dairy cow culling has been down every week. If those 39 weeks are totaled, U.S. dairy farmers sent 329,000 fewer dairy cows to slaughter from a national dairy herd that presently totals 9.3 million head. Those 329,000 fewer head sent to slaughter represent 3.5% of the nation’s milk cow herd.

This downturn extends back to 2023, extending the 39-week streak to 57 weeks. Dairy farmers began sending fewer cows to slaughter in the final week of August 2023. When accounting for this entire 57-week time span, dairy cow culling is off 469,400, head and that figure represents 5% of the nation’s milk herd.

As a point of information in this 57-week analysis, Thanksgiving was a week earlier in 2022. That being noted, this analysis was realigned to account for the regular downturn in culling that occurs each year during that holiday.

Overall, dairy cow culling will continue to show some unique patterns well into 2026 or 2027 as it will take two to three years to fill the pipeline with more dairy replacements.