World Perspectives
livestock

Livestock Roundup: Cattle on Feed Preview

USDA will release its Cattle on Feed report tomorrow; the pre-report consensus analysts’ estimate is for the inventory of cattle on feed as of 1 September to be 101 percent of last year. August placements and marketing are expected to be 98.5 and 96.5 percent respectively of last year’s totals. There was one less day in August 2024 compared to August 2023.

As always, the range for placement forecasts is the widest. The differing points of view are over the potential effects of weather, since August was drier than normal which would lead to more placements, versus total feeder cattle sales which were down from a year ago implying fewer placements.

Cattle on feed totals and placements start to pick up in August and continue...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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