Beef price tracker 2

A wet week are you having a laugh.

There's a good share of heavy cattle moved on from these parts in the past 6 weeks...its been a sh1t show weather wise since mid July.

The factories are dropping the price as the kill rises, kill has historically always risen at the end of grass season for finishers no?

Not everybody is in a position to sit on stock & wait for price hike again, thats not a sustainable way to operate a business

Factories,processors & supermarkets know full well where the bottom line is for them.

They will screw producers & everyone else along the chain to maintain there margin, how many times have we heard of factories going on 3 day weeks this summer already.

Margin per animal in your system is what leaves € in your pocket, not playing chicken with factories. Thats how alot of fellas went tit's up in the past.

What you’re saying is all true but the only way to beat the factories is stay away from the marts. If lads had kept them finished cattle and forward stores at home the factory price would have had to stay rising to entice them out. Once they were being shown in marts there was no need to lift factory price.

For every finished animal that made €100-€200 more than factory price there was an equivalent animal in the same mart making €100-€200 less so on average the factories were paying no more than factory price. I pointed it out numerous times here during the year and put up screenshots and all from the mart catalogues to prove that but a lot of lads only wanted to see the high prices and ignore the lower ones. That’s what has put the factories in the position they’re in now to be able to drop prices.

In my opinion there should be no animal any bigger than a weanling sold in a mart. If the feedlots and factories want to make money from stock let them rear them and do the hard work themselves. There’s no point lads doing all the hard work rearing them to forward stores and then handing them away for the feedlots to do the easy part.

Kill 27.5k for last week, 10k behind same week last year. Kill is going to be very high from now to Christmas. Processors will rack them and stack them. In a months time you could be waiting 2-3 weeks to get cattle killed.

I have to respectfully disagree with you lads. From now on yes marts will not be the place for cattle. However for the last summer most of is had no choice but load up and go there.

When cattle are ready they are ready, ya big well bred Continental cattle may carry a month but a lot of cattle stop dead at a certain weight.

I was holding for a price during May and June gave the local processors a chance 7.10 he was quoting when it was 20-30c higher elsewhere. Moved to another factory and K/O went trought the floor. He was still quoting 7.1 base when I took 4 Frx heifers to the mart who made the equivalent of 7.35-7.4/ kg there I would have probably being lucky to average 6.95 in the factory.

I tried again after that but no way it was the same BS. Agent getting thick with us because we would not sell at the low prices.

Went back with a few but grading killing plain HE&AA cattle compared to mart price and absolutely no flat price unless you had numbers

Admittedly last load would have done a tad better in the factory. I much perfer the factory but they really tried to ride the smaller lads this year.