By Colin Woodall
With all the volatility in the cattle market today, people are starting to question the value of live and feeder cattle contracts, wondering if they are hurting us more than they are helping. Colin Woodall of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s (NCBA) DC office and his team, have been meeting regularly as of late with members of the CME Group to try and salvage the value of the cattle futures contracts for the beef business. He told Radio Oklahoma’s Farm Director Ron Hays that discussions continue on, but there just aren’t any easy answers out there.
“There is no one silver bullet,” Woodall said. “Matter of fact, the question of what will fix this issue is one that is asked every single day among our officers, our staff and of course the membership - it is why we maintain our working group in order to try and analyze the ideas that people have to fix this, and we’ve got some ideas that we think can work.”
During NCBA’s last summer conference this past July in Denver, the group was actually enlarged to ensure all geographical regions were represented. The group was also divided into subgroups to focus on different priorities including things like the recent price volatility in the marketplace, price discovery and what mechanisms we have in place for that, and the task of deciding if specifications of the contracts themselves need changing. Woodall says these actions and others are all in the works right now, and plan to discuss these matters in person at a group meeting projected for October where he is optimistic that some final resolutions may be decided upon.
Click here to see more...