You have to have land to expand on. 

Corn is subsidized to the point Beef can not reclaim the acres row crops, and even CRP, stole from the industry. Lets just get right to the point, are you willing to give up your insurance subsidy and the ethanol mandate so beef can rebound? 

Right now it costs me 8-10k to purchase land with ditches and brush that should be grass. Pencil out the rebuilding the fence that was tore off it and paying for the land without at least a year's production to establish grass and we'll continue the discussion from there about what a banker says when you want to finance the cows at these prices.

The "lets rebuild the herd" mantra you've heard big hats with no cattle talk about was just that. It's a pipe dream that clueless people and paid propagandists talk about. US Beef no longer holds a stable position within the country's decades long cheap food policy, because of the county's decades long cheap food policy. It's now firmly in the luxury column.