As long as you're not losing money by having too many cows, you're better positioned if you have as many as you can hold... When markets turn around you don't have to go buying high priced animals to restock, rather you can sell off older cows at a good margin.. all the ones that hardly paid to keep in the bad years are now going to put money in your pocket.. Also, you have ASSETS.. If you need $50K and have 300 cows, you can sell a bunch and raise that money in a week, and production isn't going to suffer too terribly.. If you had already downsized to 150 cows, it's going to be much harder to recover from that.
I'm always weary of these "Profit" calculations... it's darned near impossible to really include everything, include it fairly, and account for different management methods...
This example sounds like the place was grossly overstocked and had to buy massive amounts of feed.. I don't think there are really all that many places like that, at least among our members here