Market Outlook Warns Of Overproduction

 

The senior market analyst with FarmLink Marketing Solutions says farmers have had to work harder over the past couple of marketing years.

 

Neil Townsend notes in the past, high prices seemed to always have been there, adding this has not been the case recently.

 

He presented his 2018 market outlook last week at St Jean Farm Days.

 

"We think that prices are going to kind of struggle to maintain momentum if they start to go up. There's just a lot of crops around in the world, big supplies of wheat, corn and soybeans and those are going to keep the pressure on prices if they try to increase. That being said, we don't really see further declines because there's just enough of a weather threat say in North America to keep it a little bit honest."

 

His biggest concern moving forward is the lack of any real incremental demand.

 

"The job of a marketplace is to clear, and that means to find a price that puts stock levels in a manageable range. Right now we've been building stocks over the last few years and the stocks are getting rather burdensome. Typical behavior is, you find the high cost producer and you put him out of business. I don't think we're at that point right now, or at least nobody thinks they're the high cost producer because every farmer, everywhere around the world is continuing to produce, continuing to plant fence post to fence post."

 

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.