October 23

10/23 - In Friday’s monthly cattle report, the USDA said feedlot inventories were 11.58M head on Oct 1, down 0.6% from a year ago. New placements onto feedlots in Sept were up 6.1%, and Sept marketings were down 10.6%. The mid-year percentage of heifers in feedlots and headed to slaughter was a 22-year high of 40.0% – with no signs (so far) of ranchers retaining additional heifers for breeding. At last week’s Market Vision Conference, David Weaber of Terrian said that the economics of raising cattle just isn’t there and that he doesn’t see cattle herds recovering to previous levels. In this month’s WASDE, the USDA projected a 4.6% drop in beef output for 2023, and a sharper 6.3% decline in 2024. CME cattle futures set another record high of $187.07/cwt on 9/22 and closed at $184.28 on Friday (10/20). Forward futures for 2024 are averaging $186.78 with a high of $190.42/cwt for April 2024.