Hollis Treadway's Two-Tab Problem

Hollis Treadway does not exist. She is a composite character built from documented conditions across the Southern Plains: six consecutive drought years, a national cattle herd at its lowest point since 1941, record wildfire seasons, and a generation of ranching families facing decisions with no good answers. Every number in this conversation is real. The person holding them is not. If she feels familiar, that's the point.

Hollis Treadway is 28. She has an ag-econ degree from Oklahoma State and works remotely for an ag-tech startup in Tulsa. On weekends she drives three hours to her family's cow-calf operation outside Beaver, Oklahoma, a place her mother's family has run for four generations. Her mother died in 2023. Her father, Dale, is 62 and has been talking about stepping back. The Ranger Road Fire burned 283,000 acres in Beaver and Harper Counties last month.¹ It came within twelve miles of the property.

On her laptop, Hollis keeps a spreadsheet with two tabs. One labeled STAY. One labeled GO. She updates it on Sunday nights.

We talked by phone on a Tuesday evening in late February. She was eating reheated chili and sounded tired.

You have a spreadsheet.

Hollis: I have a spreadsheet. Two tabs. My college advisor would be proud, except she'd also say the inputs are garbage because half the variables are things nobody can predict. Like whether La Niña actually breaks this year or just takes a nap and comes back in October.²

Walk me through the STAY tab.

Hollis: Current herd size, which is about 60% of what we ran in 2019. Projected calf prices, which are genuinely historic right now. USDA's projecting the five-area steer price hits $196 per hundredweight this year.³ Record territory. If you have calves to sell, you're printing money.

Problem is we don't have that many calves to sell, because we spent four years culling the herd to keep from going broke on feed. So the revenue line looks beautiful until you scroll down to costs. That's where the pasture recovery timeline lives. And the well levels. And the hay we've been buying from Kansas, because our grass can't carry what we've got, let alone what we'd need to rebuild to.

And GO?

Hollis: Liquidation value at current prices. Which is the part that keeps me up, because right now is the best exit window for probably a decade. Derrell Peel at OSU — I actually took a class from him — says we're at the cyclical low for inventory.⁴ Prices peak when supply bottoms out. They're projected to fall to $150 by 2031 as herds rebuild nationally.

So if you're thinking about getting out, this is the window. The window. And it's already closing.

That should make the decision easier.

Hollis: You'd think. Except the same numbers that say "sell now" also say "your remaining cattle are worth more than they've ever been, so hold them and ride the cycle up." Both arguments use the same data. I've run it both ways. They both pencil out. They both fall apart when you add what the spreadsheet can't model.

Like what?

Hollis: Like the pasture never fully recovering from the last drought. 2010 to 2015. We were still nursing the native grass back when 2020 hit.⁵ Six years later, the grama and bluestem are thin. I don't want to say dead. But they're not what they were. You can't just broadcast native range seed and expect it to bounce back in one season. That's a multi-year project. And during those years you're buying feed for cattle on land that should be feeding them for free.

That's the whole model of a cow-calf operation on native range. The grass is the business. When the grass quits, you're running a very expensive outdoor feedlot with a nice view.

The Ranger Road Fire was three weeks ago. How close?

Hollis: Twelve miles. We could see the smoke from the house. Dad had the trailer hitched for two days straight in case we needed to move cattle. The fire burned 283,000 acres. Pasture, fences, livestock — all gone for the people it hit.⁶ The Cattlemen's Association set up a relief fund, which, fine, good. But a relief fund doesn't regrow grass. A fence you can rebuild in a week. Pasture that burned on top of six years of drought stress? That's years.

And the fire risk exists because of the drought. 2025 had enough spring rain to grow a good stand of grass, then everything dried out again, so you had all this fuel just sitting there waiting.⁷ The drought grows the fuel. The fire burns whatever the drought left standing. Then you're starting from bare dirt.

Your mother's family started this place.

Hollis: My great-grandmother's parents. Five generations if you count them. Four if you start with her.

Does that make the spreadsheet harder?

Hollis: (long pause) My mom would have said you don't sell the land. Period. That was bedrock for her. But she died before the worst of this drought, before the fire season we just had, before the Edwards Aquifer hit Stage 5 restrictions.⁸ I don't think she'd have changed her mind. But I think she'd have understood why I'm sitting here with two tabs open.

My dad won't say it, but I think he's relieved someone's finally running the numbers out loud. He's been operating at a loss or near-loss for three of the last six years. He supplements by hauling livestock for other ranchers. He's 62 years old and he's hauling other people's cattle because his own place can't cover the bills.

Tell me about the water.

Hollis: Stock ponds are low. One of the three is basically a mud flat right now. The well still produces, but the drawdown is slower to recover than five years ago. And even if it rains, the aquifer doesn't fill back up like a bathtub. Surface water and groundwater across the region have been depleted past the point where a few big storms fix anything.⁹

So when someone says, "Well, what if it rains?" Sure. What if it rains. The grass still needs years. The water table still needs years. The herd still needs years to rebuild, and there aren't enough replacement heifers nationally to grow herds in 2026 even if everyone wanted to.¹⁰ "What if it rains" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Only child?

Hollis: Only child. Which is the whole thing, right? There's no sibling to split this with or hand it to. My dad and I just circle it.

If you had to bet right now — stay or go?

Hollis: (laughs) I update that spreadsheet every Sunday and I genuinely don't know. The honest answer is I'm waiting for something to make the decision for me. Another fire. A well going dry. Or the version I don't say out loud: La Niña breaking for real, the rain coming back, the grass greening up, my dad looking ten years younger overnight.

The U.S. cattle herd stood at 86.2 million head as of January 2026, a 75-year low. The Southern Plains drought has cost an estimated $23.6 billion in agricultural losses since 2020. The calf price peak projected for 2026 represents a 12-to-18-month window that will not recur for roughly a decade. Across the region, families are making versions of this calculation — on laptops, on napkins, in silence over fence lines — with data that keeps changing and stakes that don't.

Footnotes

1. Drought.gov, Southern Plains Status Update, February 26, 2026. https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-status-update-southern-plains-2026-02-26 ↩

2. La Niña fading forecast and drought implications from Drought.gov, January 22, 2026. https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-status-update-southern-plains-2026-01-22 ↩

3. USDA Economic Research Service, livestock production cycle price projections, March 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2025/march/livestock-production-cycles-affect-long-term-price-outlook-for-cattle-hogs-and-chickens ↩

4. Oklahoma State University extension economist Derrell Peel, quoted in Oklahoma Farm Report, January 31, 2025. https://www.oklahomafarmreport.com/2025/01/31/2025-cattle-herd-one-percent-smaller-than-2024-beef-cow-herd-a-half-percent-down-are-we-at-the-bottom/ ↩

5. Drought.gov, Southern Plains Drought Assessment 2020–2025, December 12, 2025. https://www.drought.gov/news/southern-plains-drought-assessment-2020-2025-2025-12-12 ↩

6. Ranger Road Fire data from Drought.gov, February 26, 2026. https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-status-update-southern-plains-2026-02-26 ↩

7. The Conversation, "Sixth year of drought in Texas and Oklahoma leaves ranchers facing wildfires," February 2026. https://theconversation.com/sixth-year-of-drought-in-texas-and-oklahoma-leaves-ranchers-facing-wildfires-and-bracing-for-another-tough-year-275219 ↩

8. Edwards Aquifer Stage 5 restrictions referenced in Drought.gov, May 22, 2025. https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-status-update-southern-plains-2025-05-22 ↩

9. Drought.gov, Southern Plains Status Update, February 26, 2026. https://www.drought.gov/drought-status-updates/drought-status-update-southern-plains-2026-02-26 ↩

10. AgWeb/Drovers, "U.S. Cattle Inventory Hits 75-Year Low at 86.2 Million Head," January 30, 2026. https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/beef/u-s-beef-herd-continues-downward-86-2-million-head ↩