Cattle Prices

Cattle prices go up, beef prices follow. Cattle prices go down, beef prices remain. A rancher may wonder what gives?

Mark McCully is the Vice President of Production of Certified Angus Beef LLC, and tries to make heads or tails of the process.

"A common question we get from from Cattleman is is they see that they know the price of fed cattle that they're selling to the Packer and then they walk into a grocery store and see if the price per pound of significantly higher than than the price they sold those fed cattle Ford we get that question sometimes of how what's the disconnect?"

He says cattlemen need to keep VALUE in mind as they make genetic decisions about their herds and decide what traits to emphasize.

"The demand signals are still really really good and as we've increase the quality of the heard you know what we've seen is is the Packers ability to have more high quality product more Choice Moore certified Angus beef brand more Prime to sell its allowed them to to pay more for for all fed cattle because of of the the rising tide if you will of equality and how that sent a very strong signal back all the way through the through the system."

He says, don't always assume retail price is driven off of the price of goods, because there is a cost for everything in between. However, premiums paid for quality remain strong.