Blach Looks At Profitable, But Volatile 2015 For Cattle Producers

The CattleFax organization is the marketing analysis arm of the cattle industry. Their Chief Executive Officer is Randy Blach. The year 2014 will go down as a market for the ages, we will probably never see a market quite as good as this last year again for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't mean that 2015 won't be a good year for cattle producers, but Blach said it will be a volatile year, but it's already been volatile for several months already.

"Every two weeks for the last six months we've been seeing these five to ten percent moves in the market," Blach said. "So this started in July and its February now and its still going on. A five to ten percent move is $10 to $15 a hundred (weight) and those moves and tending to occur about every two weeks, but we had a lot of air under this market."

In looking at 2015, pork and poultry supplies will be ramping up increasing the amount of protein available to the market. Blach said that started taking place last September and October. The unknown has been how much the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus would effect the hog population this year. He said that remains unknown, but the worst of the virus looks to behind us.

In recent weeks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the latest U.S. Cattle Inventory report. USDA reported the total cattle and calves in the United States totaled 89.8 million head, one percent above the 88.5 million on January 1, 2014. All cows and heifers that have calved, totaled 39 million, up 2 percent from the 38.3 million last year. The nation's 2014 calf crop came in bigger than expected at 33.9 million head, up 1 percent from 2013.

Blach called the report "spot on" as there wasn't anything in it that surprised the CattleFax analysts. In looking at the numbers, they had seen accelerated expansion start in June through the fall. Blach said 2014 had the largest one year decline in the number of animals harvested in the last 30 years. He said there is one exception if you don't count 2003 when there was disruption with the Canadian border.