Steak-loving consumers should start saving now – drought conditions and high corn prices have resulted in low inventories of cattle that will keep beef prices high for the foreseeable future.

Cattle futures in Chicago jumped 7.3 per cent between April of 2012 and Friday on expectations of lean (you see what we did there) inventories for 2013. The root cause of the problem is consistently high feed corn prices, resulting from the severe drought last year. Faced with higher costs to maintain herds, North American farmers have increasingly chosen to send animals to slaughter.