In recent years cattle price data has thinned out.
This has implications for Parkland farmers when they try to find insurance programs, make day-to-day producer decisions and dealing with foreign markets.
Brian Lemon, Manitoba Beef Producers general manager talks about how the beef industry shifted to how it calculates their data today.
“It’s a shift that has been happening in the industry over a long period of time where increasingly the industry is moving to contracted sales and sales that are worked out ahead of time. There is less, what we call, cash sales as a percentage of the cattle that is being sold so what that means is that the price of cattle is known to the buyer and seller and not necessarily reported in a public way.”
Better transparency is needed for the market to function at a better level. This means creating better ways of reporting the prices of cattle through the whole market.
The thinning cash market has added to price discovery concerns. Reporting agencies in both the U.S. and Canada have noted smaller volumes passing through cash markets as more and more producers turn to formula pricing and forward contracts.
