The world is short of beef cattle while very few countries have “spare” land to substantially expand their breeding herds. Brazil is about the only country with the resources to grow 10’s of millions of additional breeders. But that will take a decade or more. Meanwhile global demand continues to rise with China leading the…
Fact: In response to public complaints about rising beef prices during 2014, the Indonesian government drastically reduced import permits for beef and live cattle. Fact: As a result of reduced inventories and the prospects of even less supply, importers slowed the rate of daily sales into the slaughter market to ensure that they would not…
Get ready for a 5 year revolution of the northern Australian beef production model On the 1st of March Beef Central presented an article in which ABARES predicted further rises in beef prices for 2016/17 followed by a slow herd rebuilding process that by 2020 would more or less take the industry back to where…
For the last 20 to 30 years the world has had a comfortable understanding of beef and cattle markets. Essentially there were plenty of cattle and beef around the globe with consistent over supply from a number of large exporting regions including north America, south America, India and Australia keeping a firm lid on international…
Last week I spent a day with a group of Western Australian producers and industry representatives who were visiting some feedlots in Indonesia. Inevitably the subject got around to recent predictions that feeder cattle prices could reach $4 per kg once Australia experiences widespread drought-breaking rains. One of the lines of discussion was that…
Except for a few brief moments over the last 40 years, investing in the Australian cattle industry has been a pretty awful proposition. Unless you were fortunate enough to pick the peaks or the troughs just right, the long-term returns have been abysmal. But that is all about to change as world supply and…
Commentators around the world, especially those in the west, continually speculate whether the consumer “will resist if the price of beef rises by x cents per kg”. The fact is that consumers of beef in western nations have been enjoying ridiculously low prices for beef since the mid 1970s at the expense of the world’s…
