Cattle Production Increasing In Western Canada

Jun 05, 2020

Cattle prices have been a mixed bag as of late, according to one market analyst.

Brian Perillat is Senior Analyst with Canfax.

"Early trade this week, still quite strong," he said. "The challenge is packers are working with feedlots and paying up for cattle but they are limiting the number of volume that they will buy. Certainly there's more cattle to move."

Perillat says over the past week or so, there's been a good uptick in cattle production in Alberta.

"Packing plants now both running their two shifts. They're not quite up to full capacity at all but rather than killing maybe 2,000 a day, on a really good day they might get up to 4,000 but hopefully sustainably closer to that 3,500 give or take throughput. At times, for a couple weeks, they were under 2,000 or completely closed...Obviously there's still a large backlog of [fed] cattle."

He notes one of the big stories is how plants in eastern Canada have been running full out, adding cattle have been moving to eastern plants from the Prairies. The U.S. has also been ramping up cattle production as of late.

Perllat says markets remain volatile at this point.

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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.