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Western Ontario | I appreciate your thoughts t rock, we have a few purebred angus and herefords and talk to folks across North America and there are some common themes.
1. Previous to recent increase in cattle prices, what I’ll call the grain boom resulted in lots of mediocre land that used to be pasture/hay that was converted to cropping, if the fences got ripped out hard to imagine the fences going back in.
2. Loss of pasture to urban development and urban folks moving to the country to build their dream home, I visited 3 herds last march in Tennessee and all 3 had lost pasture to folks moving to the country and no longer interested in renting the ground for pasture.
3. Age of producers, lots of 60-70 year olds that are taking this opportunity to exit, fewer young kids interested in all the work.
4. Young kids that are interested are faced with extremely high capital costs and interest rates currently.
5. Large areas of NA the last 3-5 years that have experienced drought, pasture/feed shortage. Drought and high cull prices have reduced herds, can you afford to keep back the highest priced heifer calf you’ve ever raised to expand/rebuild your cow herd??
6.Market demand, I sense a shift in the perception of beef and its health benefits/environmental impact from some what negative to more positive. What would market impact be if fast food outlets switched from oil seeds to tallow to cook fries??
7. These seem like incredible prices but in order for the cow herd to increase we first have to hold back heifers from the feeder/slaughter stream.
8. The morning of May 20th 2003 my order buyer called and said he’d found 70 heifers I was looking for to breed, they got delivered about 11 am, we processed them and I walked in the house about noon and read the Canadian BSE announcement on the computer…..the value of those heifers and about 400 other head we had kicking around got chopped in half and all my bet worth went away and we spent the next 10 years pretty well raising cattle for nothing…..
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Cattle Cycle... is this time different ?
