Livestock “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL OCTOBER 15, 2014 • www. aaalivestock . com
MARKET
Digest T Volume 56 • No. 10
by Lee Pitts
If you can smile when things go wrong, you have someone in mind to blame.
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Nothing To Crow About
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
When Chris Hurt, an Ag Econ professor at Purdue, crunched all the numbers the Professor’s name said it all . . . a big “hurt” had been put on beef. In 2007 meat consumption in this country per person was 219 pounds of beef, pork, chicken and turkey. This year that number will be around 199 pounds, down 10 percent in just seven years. That’s nothing to crow about even for poultry people but it was especially bad news for beef. Of the 20 pound decrease in overall meat consumption, beef was responsible for 11
pounds of the drop, pork pork five pounds and chicken and turkey were down 2 pounds each. In percentage terms the news is even more bleak: consumption of beef was down 17 percent while chicken was only down 3 percent. See a trend here? It can be argued that the primary reason for beef’s drop in consumption was that since 2007 the retail price of beef rose 40 percent. Compare that to
retail price for chicken which was up 18 percent over the same time frame. Even more telling, Professor Hurt says that beef’s price rose 5 percent faster than the general inflation rate at a time when the average American family had less income with which to buy groceries.“People simply eat less meat when prices rise quickly,” says Hurt. Let’s not kid ourselves, we all know that the major reason we are enjoying such high beef
prices is not our advertising, it’s because we lost 12 percent of our cow herd just since 2007 and have the fewest number of cows in 60 years. Business school graduates would say our “national supply chain is depleted.” Talk about unsustainable! Sharing more of a smaller and smaller pie is no way to rebuild an industry. It’s not about to change anytime soon either. The National Chicken Council says we can expect a double digit increase in chicken consumption this year and 24 percent of consumers say they’ll be eating even more chicken in the future.
A Cow Conundrum Part of the solution to our consumption woes is to produce more beef but if we save back heifers to rebuild the nation’s beef herd, that creates an even bigger shortage of beef, causing continued on page two
New Mexico Small Businesses Blast US Fish & Wildlife Service Backroom Wolf Deal ew Mexicans were outraged to learn that the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Arizona Game & Fish Department (AGFD) have entered into a deal to accept an unpublished plan for Mexican wolf management in Arizona and New Mexico, according to Jose Varela Lopez, New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association President, La Cieneguilla. “It is incomprehensible that a federal agency would engage in such an action,” said Varela Lopez. “We learned on September 22 that the deal had been made. Comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and final revision of the Endangered Species Act 10j rule didn’t even close until September 23.” The Mexican wolf reintroduction has been the subject of great controversy for more than 20 years and has had significant economic impact on rural com-
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by LEE PITTS
Road Rage
More With Less arn those poultry pluckers anyway. While we’re all patting ourselves on the back, buying new pickups and feeling fine about these heady cattle prices, American consumers are jilting their former beefy first-love and have fallen hard for the two-legged soybeans. When we awake from this dream of a cattle market we may find that beef, the former King of Meats, has not only fallen far behind chicken, but the other white meat too. We may want to change our advertising slogan because when more and more consumers ask “What’s for Dinner?” these days, the answer isn’t beef.
Riding Herd
munities in the reintroduction areas of New Mexico, noted Ric Thompson, Northern New Mexico Safari Club President, Edgewood. Sources indicate that the deal cut between FWS and AGFD will do the following: (I) A Service commitment of no wolves north of Interstate 40. Wolves that are identified north of I-40 will be trapped and returned to the Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area utilizing a 10(a)1(a) permit. (II) An expressed upper population limit in the rule of 300325 Mexican wolves in NM and AZ. When the population objective of 300-325 is reached, strict removal will be implemented to reduce the population to the maximum of 300-325 individual animals. (III) Mexican wolves would be removed if impacting wild ungulate herds at a rate higher than 15 percent as determined by the States using state
methodologies of population measurement. (IV) Zones of occupancy that are similar or the same as proposed by the Arizona Game and Fish Department in their previous comments and alternative. These items were all contained in an alternative for the EIS from Arizona that wasn’t even published in the EIS, Thompson continued, so members of the public have had no opportunity to review and comment on it. “This deal clearly violates the spirit, the intent, and the letter of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),” noted Tom McDowell, New Mexico Trappers Association President, Corrales. While the deal will have tremendous impact on New Mexicans and land within New Mexico was included in the alternative developed by the continued on page three
he clean-cut boys and girls in their blue and gold FFA jackets make me so proud to be a former member. That was certainly the case when I saw on the front page of my weekly copy of the Voice News of Hickman, Nebraska, FFA members from the Freeman Chapter harvesting over 1,000 pounds of tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, beans, cantaloupe, cucumbers and zucchini that they gave to needy area residents and food pantries. Although I’m quite sure the zucchini was probably later returned under the cover of darkness. They also grew something called swiss chard and kale, which in my gardening days were known as weeds! Most FFA chapters have such activities where they strive to make their community a better place to live. And I salute them. In our town our big community effort was the annual roadside cleanup. This was back in the day when motorists thought nothing of opening the car window to empty their trash. So it was a big job and we were aided by Lions Club members who drove the trucks we filled with trash. I must admit, I dreaded the day because it was a lot of hard work and I almost picked up a rattlesnake one time. But my Grandpa lived for roadside cleanup, although my Grandmother definitely didn’t. Just the words “roadside cleanup” were enough to make her break down and sob for she knew that if anything “good” was found it would end up in her house. Probably in the living room. There is a big park named for my Grandpa in my town because he put on rodeos to build it. He was Chief of our volunteer fire department for decades, Honorary Chapter Farmer and a stalwart of our community, except on this day when his behavior was somewhat suspect. He voted himself the Inspector General and it was he who performed the mandatory check on every truck so that he might redirect it to his house if he found any “keepers” continued on page twelve
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