A New Cash Cattle Report for the Southern Plains

By Josh Maples

USDA announced last week that AMS will start publishing a new negotiated cash cattle report on October 26 that combines Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. The report uses data packers already submit under Livestock Mandatory Reporting. This doesn’t change how cattle are bought and sold, but it does change how much of the Southern Plains fed cattle cash trade gets publicly reported, and lately that has not been much.

AMS can’t publish a report if it doesn’t meet the 3/70/20 confidentiality rule, which states a mandatory price report is only published if at least three companies regularly contribute data, no one company accounts for more than 70 percent of the volume, and no one company is the only reporter more than 20 percent of the time. Colorado has been in that situation for years, and this year it became a problem for other states. The Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico weekly negotiated price has been withheld every week since early July, and Kansas has been withheld every week since late August. Kansas had not missed a week since at least 2019. Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico’s last gap was seven weeks last winter, from early December through mid-January.