The Future of Beef with Dave Weaber

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could predict the future? Think about it! Having cattle market data ahead of time could help any producer make more informed decisions when it comes to marketing their livestock. And that insight might not be as futuristic as you think!

On today’s episode you’ll hear more from Shauna Hermel and our guest Senior Animal Protein Economist Dave Weaber with Terrain Ag to discuss: 

• Market issues looking forward 3-4 years
• Competing meats
• Consumer demand
• And more!

Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org.

Transcript

General:
Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattleman, brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin. We have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let's get to work, shall we?

Lynsey McAnally:
Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work. Wouldn't it be nice if we could predict the future? Think about it. Having cattle market data ahead of time could help any producer make more informed decisions when it comes to marketing their livestock. And that insight might not be as futuristic as you think. I'm Lynsey McAnally, and on today's episode you'll hear more from Shauna Hermel and our guest senior animal protein economist Dave Weaber with Terrain Ag about market issues looking forward three to five years, competing meats, consumer demand, and more. So let's dive in.

Dave Weaber:
So we get to work on emerging market issues, in the two to five to 10-year time horizon.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Dave Weaber:
So I work on mostly beef and pork issues, competing meats, look at consumer demand, those kinds of things, renewable fuels and then regular cattle market, pork market kind of stuff. But the stuff I used to want to do on Friday afternoon, I get to start on Monday.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh, wonderful.

Dave Weaber:
Yeah, and have the pleasure of serving farm credit associations and farm credit clients, member owners, whatever we're going to call them, association members and helping them think about maybe what's coming in the future.

Shauna Hermel:
So now company wise, can you describe Terrain a little bit?

Dave Weaber:
So Terrain's a group of economists funded by three farm credit associations, Farm Credit Service of America, Frontier Farm Credit, and American Ag Credit. So we cover Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and Hawaii.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh wow. Okay. So do you get to have your annual convention in Hawaii?

Dave Weaber:
I haven't got that call yet.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay, awesome.

Dave Weaber:
So far Don's been doing those.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Dave Weaber:
I think he's been over there twice for them. So yeah, I get to see a broad swath of Central United States and continue to work. I do a bit of work with restaurant chain and grocery companies from my previous life, so maintain contact with some of those guys, so have a supply chain viewpoint I think is unique to the industry, and glad to share those things.

Shauna Hermel:
Well, we're always looking for how the market's going to go, right? Where are we going to go with these feeder calf prices and fed keto prices and we've been in a weight and it'll go higher pattern for a while. What are you seeing out there?

Dave Weaber:
So I think when we think about that kind of supply chain view, I like to start at the consumer because that's where all the dollars come from and work our way backwards. I think there's some-

Shauna Hermel:
Only new source of money, right?

Dave Weaber:
It's the only new source and that consumer side really looks pretty good.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Dave Weaber:
We started 2023 off with a little bit of a slow start year-over-year declines and spending, not terrible spending but just not as good as we had the year before. And then we went through the summer and saw a pretty rapid recovery and we saw that in retail prices going higher, a solid fat cattle market with unexpected margins for cattle feeders. And then we're starting to see the flow of those dollars through the system today after we had a little break in feeder cattle and calf prices, partly supply driven through the fall. Starting to see those recover here the last three, four weeks. Yeah, weather slowed up, some movement on some cattle, but demand seems pretty solid. Feed yards back in the buy mode. We're starting to see the back end of the futures market, really start to sense this tightening that's going to happen when we think about today's cattle inventory report.
Probably see beef cow numbers down another two or two and a half percent. That's a bit of a challenge when we start to think about how we're going to, if we've already ... And probably the most interesting number that's going to come out, I think most people agree, the cow number is what we're going to focus on. I think what feeder cattle and calf supplies outside feed yards are going to be is probably the next most important story As we start to think about that tightening of inventory, how we're going to fill up these feed yards. We're going to continue to see opportunity for backgrounders, grazing operations, if you've got moisture. Putting some early weight on some of these light calves, the big corporate kind of feed yards have sworn up and down that they're not going to get stuck placing light calves in those big yards.
They don't do a good job with them. They don't have the labor to do those cattle. I'm afraid not all those lessons have stuck. We're going to have some relearning going on in terms of dealing with those lighter cattle and the health issues that come with them, but opportunity there for those grazers. And I think as we think about the Midwest in particular with the decline we've seen in corn prices and the lack of marketing activity that the average corn farmer in the Midwest has been able to get done or has participated in so far. I think their marketing clients turned into, "We're going to walk this off the farm through these yards and feeding cattle."

Shauna Hermel:
So do you think we'll have a resurgence of maybe some of the smaller farmer feeders or do you think that-

Dave Weaber:
Yeah.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Dave Weaber:
A continuation of what we had last year. Because if we think about where the biggest margins in cattle feeding were last year, outside of what we saw from weather impacts, the cattle in the summer, the farmer feeder guys sold, there were a lot of those cattle that made $2 to $400 bucks where the hedged big corporate yards were making $40 or $50 bucks. So I think they're willing to step back in here. I think their lack of sales on the corn side so far in this marketing year are going to force some of them into thinking about that might be their next best alternative. And so we're going to see continued good strength on the marketings of feeder cattle and calves here through the spring and going into the summers, as those guys really get going on feeding those cattle.
We've seen a little bit of a split when you think about Midwest feeding. The guys that have built mono slope barns either with a pit or without, with a bedding pack or with a pit, really have a feeding advantage in this winter weather. I think most of those yards are going to be full through this year and great performance in those facilities compared to cattle standing out in muddy yards.

Shauna Hermel:
So what impact does a weather event like that have on the cattle market?

Dave Weaber:
So it's a two-phase impact because you likely get plant closures because of the weather. We saw that across Kansas and Nebraska into Iowa, so we stopped harvest for a minute, so that backed up a few cattle. Cattle feeders don't market cattle well during a weather event. A, there's not a place to sell them and B, they probably can't get trucks anyway. And on top of that they're like, "Well, the cattle are losing weight." If you're going to market them, you do it the week before it comes, and so we saw pressure the week before, the week during show list dried up. Then we figure out, "Hey, we lost 40 or 50 pounds."
The average cattle feeders response is, "I'm going to feed that back into them," to try and make up for the lost weight. The real challenge is those pounds went away and that cost that you put in them is still there and you just get to double it up. So if you got a dollar cost to gain on those last 50 pounds, now you're going to have $2.25 or $2.50 cost to gain because cattle aren't going to perform as well coming out of it and it's a downward spiral. The real response is, well, they're like, "Well, prices go up after a storm event." Oh they do because we're 50 pounds lighter for everyone we're killing.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
And so packers got to make up more head and get more head bought. You're a stiffer seller because you're like, "If I'm going to sell cattle this week and not be able to make up on the gain, you're going to have to pay more for them. And then we get a little bit of that done. But the cattle that were behind them, it wasn't like the cattle that we sold those two or three weeks were the only ones that were weather impacted. Everything in the feed yard got weather impacted. So what it ends up doing is it delays marketings over time because those cattle lost performance, they're still not performing well. We end up with more days on feed with less return. So partly you get paid for that in the marketplace, part of it you just take on the chin as you go because you're less efficient.

Shauna Hermel:
What does it do as an effect to overall quality?

Dave Weaber:
It's a mix. The challenge with from a grade standpoint, at least those first couple of three weeks after the event, the grade is less in the cattle because the physiology of the most mobile fat storage for energy is intermuscular fat, the marbling that's in the muscle and that's the first thing that gets used. Muscle first, and then so that's why that nutrition program is really important because biologically, once cattle get through their glycogen in their system, the next most available energy source is muscle, not fat. So you got to get them, they're in tough shape when they're burning fat and we're the same way as humans. That's why a lot of diet programs don't work is because people don't get into ketosis fast enough to burn fat and they burn a bunch of muscle getting there. Cattle are the same way.

Shauna Hermel:
Same way.

Dave Weaber:
Yeah.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay. And that's one of the things that we wanted to talk about today was the outlook for the quality beef market and how that is a factor. We've had some cautions as to whether or not we're going to hit that maximum on how much the consumer is going to pay it for quality.

Dave Weaber:
Well, and that's an interesting discussion. We've been doing some work on per capita expenditures, our measure of demand within our system and beef spending's in solid territory. And then when we spent the back half of last year looking at how good spending was, you got concerns about what's going on in the economy, Fed continuing on their path of tightening policy on interest rates, don't see that going away. I think when we look at job growth and wages, per capita disposable income, what's going on with spending? All those things are inflationary viewpoints from the Fed. So I don't think they're in a hurry to take rates lower yet. If we look at the Merck DOT plot consensus numbers out of the Fed participants, there's some folks that were thinking we might get five or six cuts this year. I think there's not zero probability of that, but I think it's very, very low.
I think we're going to start the first half of the year in this consistent, we're going to keep rates high, relatively speaking, for the duration until we get this money supply solved. That was what happened in the 80s when we went through stagflation, was the Fed went too quickly in terms of lowering rates and then we got in trouble and we had this big resurgence in inflation and it was really, the second round was more difficult to get over than the first round. I think Chairman Powell is very cognizant of that and he doesn't want to repeat history. So far they've managed to land a 747 on an aircraft carrier and I think that's what they're going to continue to try to do and refine that. From a consumer standpoint, when we look at the spending data that viewpoint's solid, the spending is there.
When we think about consumer spending on meat in particular, we went back and said, "All right, so beef's doing pretty good. All the ground we made the back half of the year," and this one hurt cattle producers feelings, "We took it all out of chicken."

Shauna Hermel:
Awesome.

Dave Weaber:
All the growth we had was out a chicken. Pork's not had a great year in 2020, didn't have a great year in 2023, it's not going to have a great year in 2024. They've got other consumer issues around their own demand and quality of their product. The work we started in mid 1990s on beef quality, paying dividends today, huge dividends. When we think about what happened in COVID with teaching consumers to cook our product like a steakhouse and getting that white tablecloth eating experience at home with a piece of meat they bought at a club store or a grocery store, it's fantastic because it's that continued buying opportunity that those folks have.
So we said, "All right, when we go through the back end of the year and maybe we start to see folks trade down, we need to be ready to monitor where that's happening." So we did that on a multi-species level. At the consumer level, if we look at USDA retail prices within beef, the only place we could find grade specific data and price and volume data was in the comprehensive cutout. So we took that and said, "All right, we're going to take a step back and look at demand at the wholesale level," which if it's not moving at wholesale, it's not moving at the consumer level. So we thought it was a pretty safe place to go and you got good data there. And looking domestically, prime had a great year pretty much even with 2022 levels, 2021 levels, in terms of monthly spending until we got to November and then it grew eight or 10%. I'd have to look at-

Shauna Hermel:
Eight or 10%.

Dave Weaber:
I got to look at my number here because it's shocking every time I look at it.

Shauna Hermel:
That would be an unusual jump.

Dave Weaber:
Yeah. Year over year in November, prime spending was up 10.4%.

Shauna Hermel:
[inaudible 00:15:03].

Dave Weaber:
Production was down about one and a half percent. That's pretty impressive work there.

Shauna Hermel:
What would spur that?

Dave Weaber:
So part of it was holiday. So we think about what was going on in the fourth quarter. We had holiday spending for Thanksgiving, Turkey prices were up. When we think about HPAI, we've taken Turkey inventories down quite a bit, so retailers are paying more for turkeys. Their giveaway was, in terms of what they were willing to sell turkeys for versus what they bought them for, was less than normal just because it was proportionally such a higher price. Instead of buying turkeys for $0.75 or $0.80 cents a pound, we're at $1.50. So every pound you're giving away it magnified. And so retailers weren't as aggressive on their discounts on those.
The ham market was normal, but I think consumers, when they look at that timeframe, I think about what else was going on. Gas prices were getting cheaper, wages were still growing, the job market was pretty good. We were putting more people to work. Jobs were growing. And then we think about what happened to your 401(k)s. So when you think about consumer sentiment and how people feel about their economic position, for most of us that have a job somewhere in corporate America, we've got a 401k, some kind of employer sponsored retirement and we get a statement every month, but most of that's index funds based off either the S&P or the Dow Jones, whatever kind of fun assortment you've got.
We were in record territory already in November, so people were like, "If we're going to have a holiday, we're going to have a good one." And so you think about retailer activity in terms of featuring beef, there were a lot of $5.99, $6.99 bone in whole ribeyes sold at retail, so we had a great beef showing. When you look at the folks who could afford prime, if you go to club stores, it's not that big of an upcharge from choice or upper two thirds kind of product. So I think demand there, we've built solid demand on that front. When we look at what's going on, and Angus producers in particular will appreciate this because most of the branded at least mix is upper two thirds choice product. A lot of it's either certified Angus Beef or all the Angus Me Too kind of programs that are out there. I don't know, what are we at 29 or 30 of them? It's a huge number. I lost track branded expenditures November up 13% per capita year to date, January through November up 15.8%.

Shauna Hermel:
Wow, that's amazing.

Dave Weaber:
That's pretty impressive performance. When we think about what we did to chicken month of November year-over-year change down 8.7% in November.

Shauna Hermel:
Wouldn't want to be in the chicken or poultry industry.

Dave Weaber:
I know we've got some here in the southeast, some beef producers that are also chicken producers, but at least when I would take chicken clients in my former roles out to dinner, we never ate chicken, we always ate steak.

Shauna Hermel:
So what's the limit? When you look for Prime and for that upper two thirds branded product, what's the potential?

Dave Weaber:
Well, I think the growth opportunity there is really in the more often occurrence of those buying decisions. The thing I like to go back and think about is there's seven evening meals a week. How are we going to split those up? Most folks are going to have one or two ground beef items in their basket every week. Ground beef is a separate purchasing decision, it's a convenience item. It's very flexible. Everybody in the household likes it. How do we transition, not really out of ground beef, but how do we take one of those other eating experiences, either a pork or a chicken eating experience and transition it?
I worry a little bit about, especially when we think about premium beef products, upper two thirds choice, prime items, there's got to be a limit on what price per pound could be. Relatively speaking I think we're still playing catch up from an inflationary standpoint. When you think about a grocery store and people's perceived value in the store, the meat products were the last ones to respond to inflationary pressure, which was good. I was joking with a friend the other day. We were complaining about potato chips.

Shauna Hermel:
Potato chips.

Dave Weaber:
Potato chips. Potato chips per pound cost more than prime steaks and you go buy a bag of potato chips, the bag's the same size, what's in the bag weighs less.

Shauna Hermel:
Less.

Dave Weaber:
And that's shrinkflation, I think was what a retailer would call that. They're trying to keep the price point the same and they're giving you less for it. In the meat department, we don't have that privilege, which is good for consumers.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
And most consumers when they go buy steaks, they're not thinking of pounds. They're thinking of items, if we got six people to feed tonight, we got to buy six steaks. We've seen a lot of retailers move to a thicker cut on steaks. So a lot of places used to be three quarters of an inch. That's a pretty difficult steak for the average consumer to cook to the right end point unless you like medium well, which is where it goes from medium rare to medium well in what, 28 seconds or something? It doesn't take very long.

Shauna Hermel:
Okay.

Dave Weaber:
So retailers have started thinking about, especially the ones that are club stores, you think about the Sam's Club or the Costcos where they're trying to get to a certain dollar ring on an item, to get there on a big tray and it's somewhere in between $40 and $50 bucks, you just start making the product thicker. What they figured out was they could sell thicker steaks better than they could sell thin steaks at half the price because it's a better eating experience.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
So it's a long circle to get back there, when we think about that prime opportunity and how to sell more pounds of it, for me the answer is if you're a regular chain grocery company, figure out how to sell thicker sticks.

Shauna Hermel:
Thicker steaks.

Dave Weaber:
Yeah. We've seen the club stores prove that they can get it done. Now we got to figure out how to get it done at retail. Now there's some ethnic challenges in some of those. If we think about Hispanic focused consumers tend to eat a lot of thin cut product. We'll have to still serve them. But outside of that, if you're going to put it on a grill or a pellet smoker, I call those the man's Crock-Pot because you can't screw anything up, that maybe thicker option is better. There's alternatives. Like if you buy a ribeye and it's thick, I used to think I needed to eat the whole thing. It's okay to cut it off the bone and slice it and split it up amongst a couple of us. We still get a better eating experience.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
So I think the YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, wherever, and we start seeing that kind of restaurant preparation that way. We've started to see that filter into consumers dining at home. You think about the cast iron, seared, butter-basted kind of steak prep, reverse seared kind of thing. You get that done and then what's the first thing, the guy that when he goes to serve it cuts it off the bone slices that way.

Shauna Hermel:
Oh, yes.

Dave Weaber:
It happens at my house now too and everybody's happier.

Shauna Hermel:
Yes. Yeah, it's too easy to ruin a piece of meat that's too thin.

Dave Weaber:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's the challenge with you think about pork. One of their challenges, a thin cut pork chop is impossible to get cooked well. I've got a daughter that's a senior at Colorado State, she and a roommate, they go to Costco every two weeks and they buy two whole boneless pork loin, these two independent girls and they're going to do it on their terms and they're paying their way through school. And as a father, I'm proud, I'm happy to help. But they came and they said, "All right, how are we going to do this?" And I said, "What do you mean?" They're like, "well, we need to know how to cut this pork loin." I'm like, "I will show you. First thing you do is you go buy a nice sharp knife and a steal so you can keep it that way and they have gallon Ziploc bags and I'll show you how to cut this."
And they cut two of them every two weeks and they're fantastic, fantastic pork eaters, but they don't cut any thin pork chops. Every one of them is an inch and a half thick and they got them a little propane barbecue grill. But you got to be picky. And I think the American consumer, when pork did the other white meat campaign, consumers listened and they said, "If this is what they're promoting, it must be the best." And the pale pork loin is the worst one to buy.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
Go pick the reddest one you can find.

Shauna Hermel:
And the one's got a little marbling.

Dave Weaber:
A little marble.

Shauna Hermel:
As we start going through, hopefully we're going to get some heifer retention eventually and start building up this cow herd out in the country. As we start building up those feeder calf numbers going out to market, and more fed cattle going through, how's that going to affect that quality beef picture? Are we continuing to develop the demand?

Dave Weaber:
I think we're on a good path demand wise. And I like your line of thinking here. Selfish plug, so this time last year we did a paper on prime and what producers ought to be thinking about as we go into this herd rebuilding and expansion. Top of mind things in there, are you going to be part of a branded beef program. Or developing cattle to go into one? If you are, it better be a quality driven program. Focus on grade, focus on maternal cost of production. How those mama cows perform at the ranch is still the number one profit driver of ranch income. So they got to be fertile. They've got to be able to live in whatever environment we're putting them in, so sometimes bigger cows aren't always better. We've seen a lot of that moderation kind of pressure come out of the drought as we look at those cows that perform better in those environments. We can fix a lot of that.
Maybe smaller framed cows aren't a problem viewpoint. Thinking about that from a maternal cost of production standpoint. And if we want to get more growth and grade and those kinds of things, do it from the sire side, I think your readership in the Angus world is enjoyed that space for quite a long time and we will continue to do that. More terminal focus in some lines of Angus cattle has a place, more maternal focus of some lines of Angus cattle has a place on just about every ranch. And so I think those are some things to think about. I think when we think about use of EPDs, those kinds of things, I'm going to put my twin brother's hat on a little bit the development of genomic enhanced EPDs has revolutionized the beef business in terms of progress. We got to figure out what our target is and then we can go after it and chase it. Now we've got tools to really fine tune and hone where we're going. And that process is important as we go forward here.
One of the other things I'm going to talk about while we're here is I'm doing a Cattleman's college session with the Merck and the overarching thing is talking about risk management, but risk management is a planning function. And when you think about risk management as a plan, it's the last of the plans in my view. We need a nutrition plan, we need a animal health plan, we need a genetics plan, we need a marketing plan that supports those things or those things support the marketing plan. And in doing that, if we're going to be part of targeting cattle for these premium programs, ID is important, being able to capture what those cattle are, a data management plan. Because if we can't tie those cattle and the data that goes with them together, it doesn't mean anything unless we give it to the next guy. So ID strategy is important. There's going to be a whole lot of debate here about that.

Shauna Hermel:
There's a lot of new technology to make that simpler than it used to be, isn't it?

Dave Weaber:
There is, yeah. And I think it's gotten to the point where it's important to manage individuals. There's still a lot of ranches that manage the herd, which if we want to live in a commodity business, that's the decision we're making, and that's fine. That's good for some, that's not where the extra dollars are though. The extra dollars are, especially in the emerging consumer market where sustainability things are important, we got to tie that to individual cattle. Whatever sustainability claims we can make along the way, they got to go with them along the way. Unless they're IDed, it means zero and it's worth zero and all it did was add cost to the system. So if you're in the mindset and have an opportunity to sell those value added cattle, I'm all for it. Make it part of your plan and make sure everything is in support of that plan, including the risk management plan.
But it's the last thing. And there's some things on ranches that are all or nothing. Risk management isn't one of them. It needs to be in steps like how do we progress? How do we protect ranch equity? How do we protect the cost of feed and those things that we're putting in those cattle as we go? How do we manage the equity side, the cost side, and then when there's profits in the cattle, how do we capture those and maybe leave some upside opportunity if the market goes higher? All things to consider, none of it easy. Nobody said this business was going to be easy, but there's a lot of things out there and a lot of people out there to help you do it. We just got to be part of it.

Shauna Hermel:
So what is your advice as far as how to approach developing those plans? A little bit of what you're going to talk about for your risk management.

Dave Weaber:
So I think it looks a little different for everybody, partly based on ranch or family structure. Some larger ranch operations have the privilege of having multiple family members involved each with some unique expertise, getting that divided up amongst folks. It doesn't have to be all one guy's job. There's some ranches where it is all one guy's job. And getting folks to think about, and I'm going to draw a blank on which business author said it, but there's working in the business and working on the business. Most of production agriculture doesn't do a great job working on the business because the tyranny of the urgent takes over and there's just shit that it has to get done.
So we work on the business late at night, Sunday afternoon, and most time either we're not at our sharpest or we're in a hurry, and that's not where the best planning happens. So I suggest folks really work on finding a day of the week or a time of several days of the week where you can have a little bit of quiet thinking time. I'm not going to call it lucky. How do I want to say it? I have the opportunity on multiple occasions during the week behind the steering wheel of a vehicle. I listen to ag podcasts a lot, a lot of them business focused, a lot of great ideas in there. There's a voice recorder on every cell phone. Just put your ideas on there or it'll convert them to text for you, whatever it is, capture those and then once a week sit down and go through those, get them down on paper. If we don't write it down, it didn't happen.

Shauna Hermel:
Right.

Dave Weaber:
So that's where I could, making sure we got time to work on that business. The rest will take care of itself. When you sit down and say, "All right, what am I doing nutrition wise?" Most ranches have somebody trying to sell them something all the time. That should be your cue to say, "All right, here's what my nutrition plan is, and this either fits or it doesn't fit." But if you don't have a plan to start with, what are we going to do?

General: 
Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin Extra. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this episode with any other profit minded cattleman. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work.