Farms.com Home   News

Peel Analyzes Supply & Demand Of Cattle Market

The first quarter of 2015 is almost behind us and it appears cattle prices have stabilized quite a bit lately after some wild swings in late 2014. Oklahoma State University Extension Livestock Market Economist Dr. Derrell Peel said beef demand has been limited this winter.

“That’s causing some of the squeeze in the market right now,” Peel said. “Boxed beef prices have been pretty stable over the last month or so. As have fed cattle prices, at the same time feeder cattle prices some increased a little bit.”

Right now there are competing forces. Peel said tight beef supplies continue to support cattle prices, but there is also increasing supplies of pork and poultry that are weighing on the market. He said that makes it hard for boxed beef wholesale and retail values to continue to move up, as they need to relative to the supply situation on the beef side.

Obviously, supplies are tight right now. One of the reasons for the tightness is the aggressive rebuilding of the U.S. mamma cow herd, including in the Southern Great Plains. Peel said Oklahoma has seen a pretty remarkable recovery from the drought liquidation with two consecutive years with about a six percent increase. Texas added about seven percent more cattle last year, while New Mexico hasn’t begun to grow because it remains fairly dry.

“The bottom-line is we have recovered some over the last couple of years. “We’ve got about a million head more cattle needed in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico to be at the level we were at the beginning of 2011. So we’ve still have a long way to go to fully recover from the drought liquidation.”

Click here to see more...

Trending Video

US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”