Cattle Matrix vs HonestCattle

Cattle Matrix is a breakeven calculator tool for cattle producers to estimate profitability or loss of your cattle operation. Included are calculators specific to Grower and Feeder producers.

Honest Cattle — Market Intelligence for Ranchers. Built for working cattle producers who want the same market signals the feedlots and packers see, on the same day they see them. No accounts, no subscriptions, no ads. Live Montana auction results: Billings Livestock Commission (BLS) and Public Auction Yards (PAYS) sale data parsed daily from USDA AMS reports — steers, heifers, bulls, and cows aggregated by 50-pound weight bucket with head-weighted average price, plus direct links to the AMS PDF for every sale. Rancher Share of Retail Beef: monthly USDA ERS Meat Price Spreads with a Price Transmission Index that flags when the rancher's slice of the beef dollar slips below the 5-year average — color-coded NORMAL above 41 percent, WARNING below 40, CRITICAL below 38. Grid pricing and the futures curve: the Live Cattle, Feeder Cattle, and Corn contracts that determine your fall calf bid, anchored to the slaughter window of the cattle you place this fall, with a UNL-ISU break-even calculator so you can see what corporate feedlots are willing to pay before the auction phone call. Five-area cash fed cattle and the Choice Boxed Beef Cutout, the leading signal for verified-quality calf premiums on a 5-9 month flow-through lag. The full HC Weekly Market Forecast from honestcattle.net delivered to your phone — executive summary, quarterly calf price ranges, week-over-week changes, and the data behind the call. Ranch weather: a fixed-location ranch forecast plus a current-location card, with a 5-day precipitation outlook, gust-aware wind chill, and feels-like temperatures, backed by NOAA. Park County conditions: snowpack vs the 10-year median, NRCS forage score, water-year precipitation as a percentage of normal, USDM drought class, USGS streamflow percentile. Herd records, local and private: add animals with a tag number, breed, sex, and date of birth; take or pick a photo per animal; keep calving and treatment records with withdrawal-date tracking; all data lives on your device, nothing leaves the phone. Data sources: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, USDA Economic Research Service, USDA NASS, CME Group via Barchart public quotes, NRCS SNOTEL, NOAA, USGS, US Drought Monitor. Honest Cattle (honestcattle.net) is the independent companion publication — every weekly forecast, research paper, and dataset visible in the app is also on the website, free to read. Built by Dirk Adams with the assistance of AI. No tracking, no analytics SDKs, no third-party ads.