“Tough news if you’re a meat lover,” said the headline on my Internet news page last Monday. Oh no, I thought, not another negative story about how eating meat is bad for you and the planet. Turns out I was wrong, but the reasons for the headline are what’s got everyone in the industry buzzing right now.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Is in Japan this week to promote U.S. farm exports to that country. Beef is to be featured prominently, both in the promotions and in private discussions with Japanese government officials. Both countries realize that Japans age limit on U.

Money talks, but apparently not loud enough to get the Obama administration to take a fresh approach to getting Japan to relax its restrictions on U.S. beef imports. Perhaps it is because the beef industry hasnt screamed enough about how much money the industry is losing because of the severely limited access to the Japanese market.

Why is it that packers disclose so much information about their business, but beef cattle producers so little? The contrast has fascinated me ever since I started surveying the industry’s largest packers, cattle feeders and cow/calf producers back in the late 1980s. Packers were initially reluctant to provide slaughter capacity or annual slaughter or sales data. But they soon realized

The authors did not cite meatpacking, but they could have. In 1988, the top three packers (IBP, ConAgra and Excel) shared 67.1 percent of fed steer and heifer slaughter, according to my data. Their market share climbed as high as 73.8 percent in 2001, but then declined and has remained below 70 percent ever since.

Most folk in the cattle/ beef industry will be happy to see the end of one of the most challenging years in history. You have to go back to 1973, when President Nixon imposed price controls on beef, to find one as challenging. The market was in uproar the rest of the year.

Next time you pull your boots on, reflect for a moment about how the leather business affects the price of cattle. You might be surprised at how much. That?s because hides, which are turned into all types of leather, make up two-thirds of the value of all the byproducts that come from each animal.

US Premium Beef (USPB) remains a remarkable model of how beef producers can work with, not against, packers and put more money in their pockets. USPB began operations in 1997 with a minority ownership in then Farmland National Beef and has gone from strength to strength.

The U.S.s shrinking cattle population is becoming a huge concern for the beef industry. The main reason for the declining numbers is lack of profitability. Cattle feeders in particular have lost billions of dollars in equity in the past two years. The main reason for this is high input costs and weak beef demand due to the recession.

Fed cattle processors enjoyed their best August operating margins since 2003. The real story, though, is that they achieved this not at the expense of cattle feeders. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cattle feeders enjoyed a strong and much-needed rally in prices.