Demand For Beef Remains Strong

Jan 19, 2022

Manitoba Agriculture hosted a webinar last week in place of the annual Beef and Forage Days.

Brain Perillat with Canfax gave a cattle market update.

"We had absolutely incredible beef demand through COVID, despite restaurants being closed or limited capacity," he said. "We've seen huge demand. 2015/2014, Previously, that's when we had some of the highest cutout prices. We've just destroyed those kind of price levels. We've moved into much higher prices and we did this in the fact that North America had record beef production. We had extremely strong cutout wholesale prices, we've had record high retail prices and we've had record high throughput."

Perillat also commented on international demand.

"Globally, international meat demand has been incredibly strong. Part of that's related. We've seen a flattening or almost a shrinking in global meat supplies. African swine fever decimated the Chinese hog herd. China has almost half the hogs in the world. That rippled through global meat markets, not just pork markets. We've seen incredible demand from China from Beef. They've become the world's biggest beef importer, and that supported overall global prices."

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.