January 2019 Cattle Feeding Projections
Posted: January 18, 2019 | Written By: Heidi Doering-Resch
January 2019 Cattle Feeding Projections
Welcome to the New Year!
January has been a little bit confusing from a cattle feeding standpoint thus far. Mother Nature continues to throw her punches and keeps us all on our toes. Bedding and barns have sure become a hot commodity.
The Live Cattle Futures have many of us smiling as of late, helping to bring some further cattle purchases regardless of increasing break-evens and some nice selling profits in the near term. We continue to stress that prior to purchasing cattle you have your Form-A-Feed representative run cattle projections based on your feedstuff costs and history, this allows better marketing of the cattle from purchase to selling.
Whether you feed Holsteins or colored cattle, the Form-A-Feed beef team is capable of helping you better forecast your cattle numbers and provide the tracking resources to allow us to work together to pin point some of the weaker points in your operation that need to be addressed. Tracking is a great way to help build a history of performance and health at your feedyard to help you more accurately purchase cattle for profits.
Some key points to ponder in the new year:
- Sales and distribution data for 2017 show that purchase of medically important antimicrobial drug use by species is down 33%.
- All cattle livestock haulers will need to be BQA certified by 2020 – if you haven’t done so already keep watch for more BQA certification meetings.
- We increased our beef exports in 2018 by 9%, totally over 1.13 million mt. This certainly has been a large part of our current cattle market uptick
- Cattle inventory continues to trend upwards slightly going into 2019 and forecasted to continue to increase slightly through 2021.
- Supply will be there, can we continue to drive the demand?
As always for further questions about your program or how Form-A-Feed can help provide you with our team orientated services, please contact your local Form-A-Feed dealer or Nutrition and Production Expert.