If you have been to an agricultural meeting in the last seven years you have likely heard a presentation on advocacy. In both the US and Canada, advocacy has become a call to action for farmers, ranchers, dairymen, etc. Organizations like Ag More Than Ever were founded to focus on advocacy and enabling producers to… Read More
Category: Cattle
A big spike in the United States’ live cattle cash market left producers hopeful late last week. “In the south — down in Texas, Kansas — we had the market up three dollars, to $1.28 US,” explains Gateway Livestock’s Anne Wasko, in this week’s Beef Market Update (included below). “And the northern markets — Nebraska, Colorado,… Read More
On Wednesday, McDonald’s announced the completion of its Verified Sustainable Beef (VSB) Pilot, and handed the results — and recommendations — to the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB). “It’s a really exciting day to talk about the accomplishment over the last year and a half that McDonald’s has been doing the pilot project here in Canada,” said… Read More
“We did it! We did it,” exclaimed Francesca Debiase, chief supply chain and sustainability officer for McDonald’s, pumping her hands through the air, at yesterday’s celebration of the conclusion of McDonald’s Verified Sustainable Beef (VSB) Pilot in Calgary. “Several years ago, McDonald’s supply chain made a really interesting discovery,” Debiase explained, “and that discovery was… Read More
Earlier this week, Brian Perillat, senior analyst with Canfax, joined Shaun Haney to talk about the May 1 cattle report. The report, published Sunday, showed on-feed numbers in Alberta and Saskatchewan up 8%. What caused the bump? “As Brian alluded in that last interview, the cattle that didn’t go south — the feeder cattle last fall… Read More
The number of cattle on feed in Canada is continuing to grow, according to the May report from CanFax. Part of the reason numbers are climbing, senior analyst Brian Perillat explains, is more heifers are going into feedlots. “We always gauge that as an appetite for expansion and unfortunately it still looks like quite a few heifers… Read More
Last week, Eric Micheels, assistant professor in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at the University of Saskatchewan, tweeted a link to his newly-minted dissertation, entitled Market Orientation in Production Agriculture: Measurement, Relationships and Implications. Now, normally, the word “dissertation” would do little to pique my interest, but Micheels has been vocal through the Earls debacle, and… Read More
Early last week, leaders from the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB) met with Earls Restaurants to discuss sustainable sourcing. By mid-week, the company announced it had made a mistake. “I think it was unfortunate that it happened in the first place,” Fawn Jackson, executive director of the CRSB, told Shaun Haney in an interview, “but… Read More
There’s no doubt concerns around antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are growing. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the States sees at least “2 million people become infected with bacteria resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.” In response to these concerns, the federal government released Antimicrobial… Read More
Retailers are enjoying this part of the beef cycle. Producers? Not so much. Cattle futures put in some new lows last week, as Anne Wasko of Gateway Livestock joins us for another Beef Market Update. With slaughter levels in the U.S. up around 10 percent for the last two weeks of April, there’s been a… Read More