Cattle Placements and Marketings Continue Lower Trend

Now that the government has reopened, USDA has resumed issuing cattle on feed reports. Michael McConnell is a USDA livestock analyst, and he offers up highlights on the recently released October report.

“There are 11.7 million head of cattle in feedlots with a capacity of greater than 1000 head, that's about 2% lower than a year ago.”

To no one's surprise, the numbers came in lower.

“We saw 2.04 million head of cattle placed into those feed lots, that's about 10% lower than a year ago. And cattle that were marketed came in at about 1.7 million head, which about 8% lower than a

year ago.”

McConnell shares some additional takeaways,

“Placements continue to be down sharply from a year ago. That's really just representative of really tight feeder cattle supplies. Some of that is due to the fact that we have sharply lower imports, largely due to the fact that we have bans and restrictions on cattle coming from Mexico, in addition to which we have tight domestic feeder cattle supplies, due to where we are on the cattle cycle. As a result, we're also seeing the rate of marketing reduced from last year.”

Michael McConnell, USDA livestock analyst. In other cattle-related news, the USDA has launched a new unified New World screw worm website. The website centralizes New World screw room information available across the government and reflects their whole of government effort to fight this pest through implementation of USDA Secretary Rollins's comprehensive, five-year plan The website is screwworm.gov.