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Production costs key for livestock producers

A livestock market specialist says all signs are pointing to growing cattle and hog supplies heading into 2018.

University of Missouri’s Scott Brown says that means producers are going to keep a close eye on costs in 2018.  “It is amazing how quick these industries are to expand to positive profit signals and how slow they are to respond to negative or at least break-even profit signals,” he says.

He tells Brownfield producers who can keep their production costs low will remain in business the longest.

But, Brown says with more protein coming – increasing domestic demand will be a big story in 2018.  “I think when we finish with 2018 we’re going to be back to per-capita meat consumption in this country that is above where we were in 2007,” he says.  “If you look at that data, we moved down 20 pounds were capita as we had record feed prices and the economic downturn.  Now, we’ve recovered all that and we’ve recovered very quickly.”