By his account, 16-year-old Adam Mata is swamped by his own schedule almost every day.
"A lot of people look at it and get overwhelmed," Mata said. "But what I like to say is just keep pushing through. Keep pushing through, and I promise you the light of the tunnel will be there every time."
He's a junior at Pasadena Memorial High School, southeast of Houston. Like most students, Mata spends much of the day in class and extracurricular activities. The rest of his day, though, he spends on the farm.
Lately, that's meant caring for his pregnant cow.
"It’s not stress. It is yourself shifting from being somebody who may have not been as responsible as you were six months ago,” he said. “But now with a pregnant cow, you know, you’ve learned the time management, financial management, you’ve learned how to be a responsible person."
Mata spoke with Houston Public Media on the eighth day of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. He sat in a camping chair on the floor of the NRG Center, surrounded by rows and rows of cattle.
As a young rancher, he's also entering an increasingly difficult market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts farmers will have more difficulties in 2026 paying off debts, which are outpacing the growth of assets. A lower supply of cattle is leading to increased prices of beef, though cattle ranchers may not see the returns. The U.S. Farm Bureau reported in October the cost of raising cattle has surged since 2020.
"That's caused by inflation, but it's also caused by the fact that we've had several years of droughts," Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told Houston Matters in February. "That made the feed for cattle much more difficult and expensive to procure, which means cattle herds got smaller. And that means that, now, we have less beef available. And the challenge there is you can't fix those problems overnight. Once a cattle herd is smaller, it takes years to really rebuild that supply chain."
Mata said farmers and ranchers are expected to finance themselves. He often turns to donors for aid, he said.
"With rising prices of feed, medicine, land, it all just becomes harder," he said. "Even at a young age, we’re made aware of, ‘Hey, this is happening in the world, this is what’s going on, this is why this is happening, and in the result, it’s going to affect you in this way.' "
The price of cattle ranching
The price of beef has increased by 15% percent since last year, according to the USDA. It's also likely to keep increasing, by 5.5%. Experts say a shortage of cattle takes much of the blame for that.
"Beef prices are high," said Daniel Driver, another cattle rancher at the Houston rodeo. "Beef prices have been high. The cattle prices are just now reflecting [that] because we have finally gotten to such a shortage of cattle in the market that people have been punished at the grocery stores for beef prices. But the cattlemen have not received that money."
The supply of cattle across the country has fallen to its lowest level since 1952, according to the USDA. As of January 1, 2025, there were 86.7 million cattle in the United States.
"We have been struggling with it for a long time," Driver said. "But farmers are price takers, not price setters. And so we have to take what we can get for it."
Though farmers' assets are at their highest rates in 50 years, so are their debts. The USDA estimates farmers' real estate debts are going to grow to $404.3 billion in 2026, a nearly 5% increase year over year. Non-real estate debt is expected to reach $220.4 billion, a 6% increase since 2025.
The farming industry overall is expected to earn a profit this year, but almost none of that will be driven by farming alone. Other ventures "including wage income, nonfarm business earnings, dividends, and transfers, are the main contributors to income for most farm operator households in the United States," according to the USDA.
In other words, most farmers, particularly non-commercial ones, cannot earn a profit by farming alone. In fact, the median income from farming alone will be a loss of $1,161.
Across the supply chain
Glennard Hannible Hart Sr. first participated in the Houston rodeo's barbecue cookoff in 1972, according to his son, Glennard Hannible Hart Jr. Since then, Junior, as he's known, has taken up the mantle of running their barbecue joint along with his twin brother Glennard Earl Hart.
As chief cook, Junior said he's participated in seven cookoffs. In recent years, their outfit, called G.H.'s Outlaws, has spent between 15% and 20% more year over year to keep up with costs coming out of their pocket, while demand has also increased.
"This year, for today alone, we spent $4,000," Junior told Houston Public Media at the World's Championship Bar-B-Que contest on Feb. 26, the first day of a three-day contest ahead of the rodeo. "And it’s because the cost of meat, you can’t cheap out [on it] unfortunately, because you see in the long run, what happens. But $5 a pound is a steep price to ask."
In its latest report analyzing data from the final months of 2025, the Texas Restaurant Association found that conditions for restaurants were better, albeit marginally so. More restaurants said their profits were increasing, and fewer said their profits were decreasing. Still, more than half of restaurants in the report said their profit margins decreased.
"It has been a really tough two years, honestly, in the restaurant industry," Erickson Streufert said. "A lot of that is driven by inflation. We all know everything costs more. Whether you're talking about food, labor, utilities, insurance, credit card processing fees, almost everything that sort of goes into a restaurant — the inputs, if you will — costs significantly more than they did a few years ago."
Much like Mata, G.H.'s Outlaws has depended on donors to help cover the cost of beef. That helps Junior and his brother run the operation which, for them, is a way of preserving their father's legacy.
"We decided to maintain his message and memory by being good hosts, being good friends, being good family and providing a helping hand when needed for our community,” Junior said. “It’s not a restaurant. This is all voluntary. We come out of pocket for everything here."
Houston Public Media’s Natalie Weber contributed to this report.
Copyright 2026 Houston Public Media News 88.7