Agricultural News
Consumers Push-Back Over Record Beef Prices
Fri, 12 Sep 2014 14:59:31 CDT
The Livestock Marketing Information Center based in Denver, Colorado works with land grant universities across the country on livestock prices and market outlook.LMIC has been researching retail beef margins - looking at the ability of retailers to be able to move beef at record high cattle prices and as a result record high beef prices. Livestock Marketing Information Center Director Jim Robb said he has found demand softened this summer.
"We have to take retail prices with a bit of caution, because those are very difficult to capture given all of the featuring and club card sales, etc., but USDA does put together
a monthly price series," Robb said. "We saw that retailer margins were quite good this summer, until we got to the month of June, then started to make a bit of back tracking in July. The retailer margin is really the difference between the wholesale beef price and the retail beef price, (the retailer margin) actually slipped pretty strongly in the month of July and declined about 12 percent compared to a year ago."
Radio Oklahoma Ag Network Farm News Director Ron Hays featured Robb's comments on Friday's Beef Buzz. You can listen to the full feature by Clicking on the LISTEN BAR below.
Robb said this situation is similar to what has happened with international demand in showing periodically that retailers struggled at times this summer passing along those record high wholesale beef prices to consumers. With this being only a single month worth of data it is hard for this ti be considered a trend. Robb said softer beef demand may or may not carryover into the fall months.
"It does probably paint the picture both international trade data this summer and the domestic retailer margins, why we had a bit of softening and quite a volatile market environment both at the wholesale and at the fed cattle level as they market try to sort out the evolving demand side of the story," Robb said.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network- but is also a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today's show- and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
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