During a 2022 census of agriculture in the state, the average price of a pound of ground beef was $1.71. That year cattle sales represented about 26% of the state’s livestock and poultry product sales in the state, according to the report, accounting for $427.5 million.

That price soared, reaching “an all-time high” of $6.32 in August 2025.

“Declining cattle inventories, sustained demand, and rising input prices are (driving) the price increase,” the report says. “While producers benefit from higher beef prices in the short term, they are faced with higher costs to rebuild their herds in the long term.”

Hog production is also in sharp decline in Utah. After Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in Utah, ended contracts with 26 hog farms in the state in late 2023, the inventory of hogs fell from a high of over 1 million in September of 2020 to 105,000 in September 2024, researchers wrote.

Smithfield Foods announced its decision to end the contracts “to optimize its supply chain for more efficient operations in the face of an industry oversupply of pork, weaker consumer demand and high feed prices,” the company said in a news release issued in 2023.

While farmers are receiving more money for their products, nationally, their business costs have been more volatile, the Gardner Institute wrote.

“The prices paid index for crops has been relatively stable since 2022, while the prices received dropped from 2022 through early 2025 before recovering slightly,” the report says. “For livestock, the prices paid index steadily rose from 2020 through 2025, while the prices received index grew more rapidly over this period.”

The 2022 census also measured that farm sales in the state totaled $2.3 billion that year.

“While the sales of agricultural products represented a small share of the state’s overall economy, agriculture plays an important role in many rural areas and covers nearly one-fifth of all land statewide,” researchers found.