USDA expects EU cattle herd to keep shrinking through 2027 as ASF shapes pork outlook

The United States Department of Agriculture expects the cattle herd of the European Union to keep shrinking in 2026 and 2027, held down by high production costs, tighter regulatory requirements and the spread of animal diseases, according to the meat industry publication eurocarne.com. The same outlook describes an EU pork sector whose production and trade prospects remain conditioned by African swine fever.

A cattle cycle that is not turning

A declining herd is the central assumption behind the department's European beef forecast. eurocarne.com reports that the contraction is expected to continue across both forecast years rather than level off, which means the slaughter volumes supporting current beef output are being drawn from a shrinking base of breeding animals.

Three pressures are identified in the forecast:

• elevated production costs across feed, energy, labour and finance;
• a tighter regulatory framework covering environmental and animal-health obligations;
• the spread of animal diseases, which disrupts herds and trade at the same time.

The structural problem for beef is timing. Decisions to retain or cull breeding females feed through to slaughter supply only after several production years, so a herd that contracts in 2026 constrains output well beyond the end of the forecast period. Higher cattle prices do not fix that on their own: rebuilding requires holding heifers back from slaughter, which tightens available supply further before it loosens it. Where producers decide to exit instead, capacity leaves the sector permanently, since land, buildings and skilled labour are rarely brought back into cattle production once they are redeployed.

African swine fever shapes the pork outlook

For pigmeat, the forecast is framed around African swine fever rather than cost inflation alone, eurocarne.com reports. The disease affects the sector through two separate channels. The first is direct: outbreaks in commercial herds mean culling, movement restrictions and restocking delays in the affected zones. The second is commercial: confirmed cases trigger import suspensions by third-country buyers, and the scope of those suspensions depends on whether a regionalisation agreement is in place, which limits the ban to a defined zone rather than the whole member state or the whole bloc.

That distinction is decisive for a sector whose economics depend on export placement of cuts and offal that command little value on the domestic market. A single confirmed case in a region with significant export volumes can remove a market for weeks or longer, while production continues. The result is a pricing environment in which disease risk is carried permanently in forward contracts rather than appearing only when an outbreak occurs.

What it means for processors and trade

Slaughter and processing capacity in the EU was built for a larger cattle population. A smaller herd raises competition between abattoirs for available animals, pushes up procurement costs and lowers capacity utilisation, which lifts fixed costs per carcass. Smaller and less specialised sites are the most exposed to that arithmetic, and consolidation pressure increases as throughput falls.

On the trade side, a structurally shorter EU beef supply widens the space for imported product, making the bloc a more attractive destination for suppliers outside it, subject to tariff quotas and sanitary requirements. For pork, the direction of risk runs the other way: EU exporters remain dependent on the sanitary status of their production regions and on the willingness of importing countries to recognise zoning. USDA projections are forecasts rather than commitments, and are revised as herd inventory data and disease notifications are updated.