Looking back over the year, there are a couple of surprises when it comes to the cattle markets in 2024. Rusty Halvorson has more details.
Many factors can affect agricultural prices, including weather, global events and sometimes simple supply and demand.
StoneX Chief Commodities Economist Arlan Suderman says there were a couple of surprises in the year’s cattle market.
“The first would be how heavy a carcass weights that we were able to achieve, followed by how high imports of beef were. And so, when you look at the tight supply of cattle that we had, but you add in the higher carcass weights with cheap corn [it] allowed us to feed those animals longer and create these record carcass weights. And then you add in imported supplies, we actually saw overall beef supplies kind of stable to even higher, at times levels than year ago here in the United States. But yet we’ve kind of held up prices to keep those imports and to keep those feeding margins there in order to keep feeding to those higher carcass weights.”
Meanwhile, Suderman says the hog sector didn’t get the expansion that was expected.
“And we were overall expecting demand to start falling off for pork and for beef, and it held stronger than expected on the consumer level here in the United States. Even our exports, especially for pork, held better and that helped prop up hog supplies and pork prices, as well. So, I think the overall protein sector performed better than what we anticipated.”
That’s Arlan Suderman, Chief Commodities Economist Arlan Suderman.