Where are we in the Cattle Cycle

[jmillang]

I have been asked several times, by producers 'Where are we in the cattle cycle?' I usually ask them did they keep any/all their heifers, are they keeping back cows that may have been culled in lower prices. Are agri-ville beef producers holding back breeding animals from the fat/beef market? What are we going to see for prices this fall for calves? Will you sell heifer calves or keep them?

[cowhand]

Where are we in the cattle cycle? Here's some things I noticed about the cattle cycle... Year in and year out the grass all gets eaten yet if you go by the notion of a cattle cycle some of those years there should have been more grass than cows. Just look at the fallout from the pot the RCALF people stirred up, we are shipping more beef down to the US than ever before yet the US experts say that we weren't impacting their market prices. Jeff, you could be asking the wrong guys. Does it really matter where a Canadian beef producer is in the cattle cycle or is what the Yankee herd is doing way more important. I did some reading about the Aussie view of the cattle cycle, they see it as an American thing that impacts their prices, they don't see that they have a cow cycle of their own. I remember an old rancher saying that the only time the cow herd changes size is in times of drought. I think he is right. I dug through some old papers and found the original pamphlet the Canadian Cattlemans Association was handing out that told us all about the cattle cycle. In the late seventies federal ag minister Gene Whelan was eyeing the beef industry as the next target for marketing boards. At the time the beef industry was hurting from low prices. Concerned with the prospect that the beef industry would accept the idea of a beef marketing board Charlie Gracey, who was general manager of the CCA at the time, started popularizing the notion of a cattle cycle to give producers hope that better prices were just around the corner if we would just hang onto the cows tail long enough. Charlies ideas became part of industry thinking when Harold Dodds who was editor of the Cattleman Magazine at the time gave the idea a lot of ink in his magazine as well as running a special column called the Beef Watch which supposedly kept track of just how we were doing numbers wise. And sure enough better prices did improve after a few years making Charlie look wiser than a tree full of owls. Yet if you carefully read Charlie's pamphlet on the cattle cycle he was very careful to not draw any conclusions about the number of cows in the Canadian herd and the price we receive for our beef. Charlie pointed out clearly that there are many cycles of interest to the beef producer, the meat cycle being the most important but there are fat cattle cycles, feeder calf cycles etc. Harlan Hughes and other economists tell us how calf prices tend to be highest towards the end of each decade and how they are lowest in the middle of each 10 year span. Yet I think there has to be more to it than just the numbers of cows. It would seem to make sense to me that the price of grain and interest has to make a big difference in what the cow calf guy gets for his weaned steer in the fall, so how does this fit into the cattle cycle? That all I got to say but I will leave you with this to chew on. Some years back, we used to run a feedlot selling fat steers. My father pointed out that every time we had a federal election the price of fat steers dropped. How does that fit into the notion of a cattle cycle?

[danm]

The drought theory makes about the alot of sense. We are paying a 1.50 for grassers right now (500 lbs) & that is only because the pastures look great. (sw mantitoba).In the past anybody that expands during wet years is always downsizing in drought because it is just too expensive to feed in July if you have a winter coming.