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| I don't think it will end beef at the supermarket but everything else will change. Just look at hogs. Packers want a steady (or a large) supply of product to insure a steady to low price. As Pofarmer says, guys used to make some decent money feeding out small pens of cattle and hauling them to the local sale, where buyers put together potloads of fats and delivered them to the packer. Same thing happened with hogs through the seventies and for the most part the eighties, now almost all pigs are either contract raised for the packer or significantly discounted at auction markets, the few that remain. Just the way cows are, I think we will still have smaller cow herds, but much larger commingling pools utilizing scans and ultrasounds to commingle feeder calves multi-potload groups to be shipped to feedlots. If your calves fall out of those loads, you probably won't pay the bills to have raised them. Right now there is excess feedlot capacity and lots of red ink, a good opportunity for big money to get a better grip in the market. Right now there is way too much price fluctuation and quality variance in the fed supply to satisfy packer's margins, they will do something about it, as one company now predominantly controls the beef packing business, and guess what, they aren't even an american company. Everyone said they couldn't do it with hogs, then they said there is no way they can dairy mega-size, but guess what they did, now they are onto the beef. Just my feeble thoughts, but an excellent topic for discussion, which I think we need to be addressing much more aggressively.
Eddie | |
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beef markets any upside?
