Australia's Retaining Herd Numbers Should Benefit U.S. Beef Producers

At the Idaho Cattle Association/Washington Cattlemen’s Association joint Mid-year meeting this week, U.S. Meat Export Federation Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Dan Halstrom shared that Australia’s diminished beef herd could be a positive for U.S. beef exports.
The outlook for Australia’s beef herd is estimated at 26.2 million head —- which is 3.4 million head or a 12 percent reduction since 2013 and the smallest herd since 1993. The prediction is for the herd to continue to decrease to 25.9 million in the next year. Australian beef exports are now at 1.06 million metric tons —- the lowest since 2012 and is forecast to dip below a million metric tons to 950,000 metric tons. So far in the first quarter of 2016 Australian grain-fed exports have reduced to Japan by 18 percent. Halstrom said
Halstrom: “Well, what we’ve seen in the last two or three years is Australia has been in a liquidation mode so it had supplies that have been inordinately high and prices have been respectively low. But we are seeing that switch — as they are starting to get rain we are seeing Australian producers holding on to cattle. We’re starting to see the wholesale prices of Australian beef in in a lot of these key Asian markets go up and up significantly. So this is an opportunity for the U.S. industry to displace some of the share that Australia has gained in the past several years in Japan and Korea.”