Agricultural News
Stronger U.S. Dollar Impacting Boxed Beef Sales
Tue, 17 Feb 2015 11:45:36 CST
On a regular basis, Ed Czerwein of the USDA Market News Office in Amarillo, Texas offers a review of the previous week's boxed beef trade. Here is the weekly boxed beef trade for week ending February 14. The daily spot Choice box beef cutout ended the week last Friday at $237.68 which was $1.40 lower. There were 815 loads sold for the week in the daily box beef cutout. It was about 13% of the total volume. Click on the LISTEN BAR below to listen to Ed's comments about the weekly boxed beef trade.
The comprehensive or weekly average Choice cutout which includes all types of sales including the daily spot cutout was $239.47 which was $5.60 lower. There were 6,102 total loads sold which was 499 loads lower than the previous week. The formula sales were at 3,198 loads which was only 35 loads lower than last week and are 52 percent of the total loads sold.
Exports as reported on the weekly box beef report are predominately muscle cuts dropped quite a bit and they were at 591 loads which was 313 loads lower than the previous week. 166 loads were sold to our North American Free Trade Agreement neighbors and 425 loads were shipped overseas.
The most recent out-front sales were at 747 loads which was 445 loads lower than last week and dropping down from the 2,400 loads two weeks ago. The long term contracts which are part of these outfront sales dropped from 1,440 loads two weeks ago, down to only 54 loads.
Taking a look at the primal cuts, the choice loin, rib, and round primal cut prices were 3 lower and the chuck was 8 lower.
The big item to watch in recent weeks has been the 50% trimmings which sky rocketed for a while after the first of the year but dropped another $7 last week. They reached 145 mid January then 87 last Friday and are helping put downward pressure on the cutout now.
This year we continue to increase our imports of fresh beef. These fresh beef imports include a large quantity of trimmings that goes into ground beef products. The latest report of Imported meat passed for entry into the US for Feb 07 showed that week we imported 23,102 metric tons of fresh beef which equates to almost 51 million lbs for that one week. Year to date for the first 6 weeks of this year we are running 62% higher fresh beef imports than last year and Australia is up 111%, providing the biggest individual chunk of the imports and New Zealand is up 58% and are the second largest country. Our high beef prices and the higher value of the dollar are definitely attracting imports.
The Cow Cutout was $2.46 lower and the ninety percent trimmings were $3.45 lower last Friday marking the 2nd weekly decline since last July. The ninety percent trimmings which are the major driving force behind the cow cutout along with the cutout itself have both traded in a very flat line for the last 7 months until just recently. The cow cutout was at $228.61 and the Select cutout was $233.95 on Friday widening the spread.
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