NASS Axes July Cattle Report
Cattle Inventory Reports Dropped to One Per Year
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
The National Ag Statistics Service (NASS) has now announced that there will be one fewer statistical report in the world of livestock. It is the July Cattle Report getting the axe. Will it matter?
Tanner Beymer, senior director of government affairs with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, says the decision to quit the July cattle report couldn’t come at a worse time for the cattle industry…
“If you want to just look at that July cattle inventory report, that is an incredibly important set of data that a lot of market analysts, livestock producers, and other participants in the marketplace rely upon to give us a sense of what's going on with supply and demand dynamics. And that's especially critical during the phase of the cattle cycle that we're currently in, which is herd contraction. This has been very similar to the 2014 run in a lot of ways but in several other ways, it's been very different. We won't be able to compare and contrast the two and get an accurate picture of where we are at as an industry without that information that comes out in that July report.”
The July cattle report is one of only two per year the marketplace gets from NASS, so Beymer says it will have a big impact on the cattle industry, taking away one tool used to make better informed decisions.
Also of note, the agency is discontinuing the Cotton Objective Yield Survey as well.
