Building U.S. meat inventories could cause woes

Jun 26, 2018

Trade disruptions may lead to further increases in meat stocks

By Kaitlynn Anderson
Staff Writer
Farms.com

The U.S. could face a red meat and poultry supply issue if the country’s frozen inventories continue to rise.

The United States had 2.499 billion pounds of frozen beef, pork, chicken and turkey in cold storage as of May 31, the USDA’s most recent Cold Storage report shows. Pork products accounted for 621.736 million pounds of this total.

The red meat and poultry inventories increased 8 percent from the May 2017 stocks and are 10.5 percent higher than the country’s five-year average, analysts at the Steiner Consulting Group, an economic consulting company in New Hampshire, revealed in their Daily Livestock Report yesterday.

“This volume is only slightly lower than the all-time record established last fall,” the experts said.

And the current supply could continue to grow.

“Normally, freezer stocks move up between now and September,” the analysts said.

Source: Daily Livestock Report, June 25, 2018

In the pork sector specifically, the U.S. saw an above-average increase in the supply of hams in cold storage.

Weighing in at 139.2 million pounds at the end of May, the inventory increased by 24 percent over the previous month, the report said. (Over the past five years, the average increase for this period was 21 percent.)

If trade disruptions occur between Mexico and the U.S., ham inventories could increase even further, the analysts warned.

Trade challenges with other markets could also have negative effects.

The U.S. exported around 1,000 metric tons (MT) of pork to China per week in March, the report said. In May, this amount fell to 300 MT per week. Last week, American exporters didn’t ship any pork to Chinese markets.

Experts fear that the meat and poultry industries could face more challenges in the future.

“The effect of tariffs on U.S. pork has only started to be felt and will only get worse from here,” the analysts said in the report.

Evgeniy1/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo

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.