USDA released its monthly cattle on feed report today showing a total inventory of cattle and calves in feed yards of 11.9 million head on 1 November, which is slightly (25,000 head) below last year.
All categories were well aligned with the pre-report expectations - another sign that cattle markets are back in balance, except that there was a wide range of placement guesstimates, from 99 percent to 105 percent of last year. With the average guess at 102 percent, however, it’s clear there was a consensus around placements. As we’ve noted before, the pre-report estimate is based on the Olympic average (i.e., eliminating the high and the low before calculating the average) of the various analysts’ forecasts. The ave...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
