Riding Herd
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
by LEE PITTS
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
June 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 59 • No. 6
The Trump Bump
W
On The Other Side
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Ag economist David Kohl compared the rise and fall of cattle prices to climbing Mount Everest and says we are now safely on the other side. Cattle prices bottomed out in the fall of 2016, right before the election. Back then, 550 pound steers were fetching, on average,$1.34 per pound and 750 pound steers were selling for $1.22. But in the first week
chairs. “I’m asking the Forest Service to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and if they’re not, then I don’t think they should be allowing mountain bikes at all, frankly, because mine is no different,” Berlly said. In a letter to Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler is championing Berlly’s cause, writing: “Our National Forests are community assets, and it is troubling that individuals employed to act as stewards of those assets are limiting access by the physical disabilities community through discriminatory actions.” No exception, for now Electric bikes, or e-bikes, come in four different classifications, identified by the speed they can travel, how the motor is activated and other factors. Berlly rides a Class-1 e-bike designed for mountain biking. She bought it thinking the Forest Service would see it as a regular bike. It has almost all the same parts as a traditional mountain bike, save for an enlarged crank where the motor sits and an 8-pound battery attached to the frame. The motor activates continued on page four
continued on page four
If you haven’t fallen off a horse…then you haven’t been ridin long enough. of May 2017 those same 550 pound steers were bringing $1.68 for a 25% rise since the election, and 750 pounders rose 20% to $1.46. Granted, those prices aren’t the highs we saw back in the glory days of 2014 but they really aren’t all that bad. It doesn’t seem that long ago when we were all wringing our hands and worrying as we pondered the almost guaranteed election of Hillary and a further deterioration in the cattle market. Farm economists were predicting even lower lows and the
NCBA was urging Congresspersons that we simply had to have the passage of the Trans Pacific Partnership or we’d revisit the wreckage. It’s amazing what one election can do! Now we have President Trump dismantling the regulators and sending the TPPers packing. And lo and behold, instead of falling, the market rose dramatically. Each week finds packers caught short of their own inventory and having to pay sharply higher prices to fill orders. One week saw cattle rise $10! IN ONE
WEEK! The Sterling Profit Tracker showed for the week ending May 12th that feedyards saw $536 per head gains. To take advantage of the profit margins packers were sending ever-greener cattle to town. So many green fat cattle are being sold that the spread between between Choice and Select grew to $20 and carcass weights are down 3.8%. With so much less beef being produced, and retail ground beef prices at their lowest point in five years, the beef market is sizzling. USDA’s cold storage report indicated that red meat supplies in freezers were down 4% from last year and the market for beef seems to be creating its own tailwind. Compare this to post-Trumpian times when feedyards were holding cattle long after their continued on page two
Forest Service Says ‘NO’ To Disabled Woman Seeking Access To Mountain Bike Trails With E-Bike SOURCE: PROTECT AMERICANS NOW
T
he U.S. Forest Service (USFS) says even though Bella Berlly, Klickitat County, Washington, has a degenerative disease, she can’t use an e-bike on mountain-bike trails. She says that’s discrimination, and a Washington congresswoman is joining her fight. After spending roughly 30 years as a mountain biker, Bella Berlly wasn’t ready to give the sport up when she was diagnosed with a degenerative muscle disease. Unable to power a bicycle entirely on her own, the resident of White Salmon in Klickitat County found the solution in an electric pedal-assist bike. But the USFS sees her bike as a motor vehicle and thus not allowed on mountain-bike trails. Instead, her bike is restricted to off-highway vehicle routes used by Jeeps, all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes. A motor is a motor, according to the Forest Service and mountain-bike advocacy groups, and electric bikes should stay off trails designated for hikers, horses and cyclists. Berlly says that’s discrimination. She wants the USFS to allow disabled people to use e-bikes on nonmotorized trails in the same way they’re allowed to use motorized wheel-
I
’m not much of a world traveler. Outside of a dinner in Juarez and a week of giving speeches in Alberta, the only other country I’ve been to is Australia. The only thing foreign to me there was vegemite, a salty, bitter, wood-putty-like substance that they slathered on everything they ate. It smelled like a pair of gym socks that haven’t been washed in a month and tasted like what gets in your mouth when you work cattle with your mouth wide open. On the opposite side of the world-traveling spectrum we have some friends who are always bragging about how adventurous they are, as if Scotland is the New Frontier and they are Davy Crockett or something. I’ve heard their story numerous times about how they survived a week in Croatia, surviving on nothing but food and water. My friends are always off gallivanting all over the world, trying to eat a bigger slice of life than us homebodies. They have scrapbooks documenting how they had their stomachs pumped on three continents. The cosmopolitan couple brag about having eaten zebra, fried cockroaches, lutefisk soaked in lye, boiled sheep eyeballs and stewed pig intestines all while trying to make me feel small because the most gutsy and dangerous foods I’ve ever consumed were my mom’s leftovers. I have no desire to travel abroad or to eat the food the natives do. No thank you, I’ll stick to my good old mononitrate, monosodium glutamates right here in the U.S. of A. I’m not going anywhere, especially with all the terrorism going on around the world. But my friends shrug it off and say, “But Lee you should have tasted the fried scorpions and grasshoppers we had in Thailand, the stink bugs we ate in Africa, the tuna eyeballs, wasp crackers and fried spiders in Japan, the witchery grubs in Australia, the silkworms in Korea, the congealed blood in Europe, the birds-nest soup in Vietnam and the deep-dish hag-
BY LEE PITTS
hat’s that foreign feeling in the air at your local livestock auction? It’s a strange euphoric feeling we haven’t felt since the good old days way back in 2014. Could it be, nah, it couldn’t be optimism, could it? Last autumn we’d all been a bit down in the dumps due to historic declines in the cattle market, but ever since Donald Trump got elected to be our 45th President cattle prices have been on a steady rise. This begs the question, was Trump responsible? Are market fundamentals now giving cattle prices a more firmer footing, or are prices just being driven by the paper players in futures markets who are playing momentum swings? Just how much, if any, of the renewed optimism that has cattle traders now putting money back on the table, due to a Trump bump?
Something To Chew On
www.LeePittsbooks.com