Cattle lounge in pens at a feedlot near Lubbock, Texas on Dec. 16, 2013, at the height of the state's recent years of drought. (AP Photo/Betsy Blaney)

(Bloomberg) — In the heart of U.S. cattle country, a four-year drought got so bad that Jim Sartwelle’s east Texas ranches looked more like dirt parking lots than pastures. At one point, to keep the animals fed, he bought two truckloads of grass cut from the side of a road in Louisiana, about 200 miles away.

All that changed when the rains starting arriving in March and kept falling. May was the state’s wettest month on record, and now there is more green grass than the cattle can eat. With the drought over, ranchers like Sartwelle are preparing to expand U.S. herds that had shrunk to the smallest since 1952 and sent beef prices surging to records.

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