Cattle Production Increasing In Western Canada

Jun 05, 2020

Cattle prices have been a mixed bag as of late, according to one market analyst.

Brian Perillat is Senior Analyst with Canfax.

"Early trade this week, still quite strong," he said. "The challenge is packers are working with feedlots and paying up for cattle but they are limiting the number of volume that they will buy. Certainly there's more cattle to move."

Perillat says over the past week or so, there's been a good uptick in cattle production in Alberta.

"Packing plants now both running their two shifts. They're not quite up to full capacity at all but rather than killing maybe 2,000 a day, on a really good day they might get up to 4,000 but hopefully sustainably closer to that 3,500 give or take throughput. At times, for a couple weeks, they were under 2,000 or completely closed...Obviously there's still a large backlog of [fed] cattle."

He notes one of the big stories is how plants in eastern Canada have been running full out, adding cattle have been moving to eastern plants from the Prairies. The U.S. has also been ramping up cattle production as of late.

Perllat says markets remain volatile at this point.

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