I haven’t been to a Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) meeting for a long time, at least since the last time Colorado State University hosted the meeting. There is always a lot to talk about and folks to visit with. Everyone is focused on improving the beef business.
Beef demand today is stellar. It rarely happens when the beef industry has been able to produce more beef and sell it for more money. We have ample supplies of finished cattle to sell and the average all-beef retail price is around $5.68 a pound. Consumers are spending on beef with confidence.
The BIF is in its 50th year and it is remarkable what has been accomplished in terms of cattle performance and quality. In the early 1990s, the NCBA started doing beef quality audits and found out that consumers considered one out of four steaks unacceptable for flavor and taste and overall palatability. The call was made through our beef industry organizations that we must become more consumer-focused. I’d have to say we’ve done a pretty good job of that over the last 25 years. Our business had a lot of fixing to do, especially after those first 20 years—what I call the genetic revolution—when cattlemen were chasing every fad breed in the book, and cross breeding them every which way.
It’s refreshing that today we have accurate selection tools to measure and utilize genetics that have helped us reach those goals. Seedstock breeders became masters of their craft and provided the industry with lots of data on their cattle, and their commercial customers’ cattle.
Today’s cattle perform extremely well, on grass, in the feedlot and on the rail. Ironically, the drought of 2013 forced a lot of cattlemen to cull herds hard and I would say as a result we’ve made a lot of genetic improvement in just the last five years.
In the cattle business we’re good at reading market signals. If the packer will allow us to produce cattle that dress out at 1,000 pounds, we’ll do it, and we have the cattle to do it. If they grade Choice or better, that’s even better. But along with those high-performance steers came big cows. And what would you expect after selecting growth genetics over the past 25 years?
One thing we don’t hear enough about in today’s meetings is maturity. When you produce a 700-lb. calf, the only place for him to go is in a feedlot to get him to slaughter weight in 14 months, and don’t get too excited about quality grade; it may not be there. Maturity helps grade.
My point is that rapid growth alone may not be the best economic trait, at least these days. We’ve got enough growth in cattle. And now the adverse effects of all that growth are entering the picture, which are costly. Pulmonary arterial disease—brisket disease—was talked about quite a bit. Most of the talk was about high-altitude cattle in the past and selecting bulls with low PAP scores.
Now the conversation is turning to sudden death syndrome. These cattle grow so well that they are getting up to 1,450 pounds and dying. You’ll see the symptoms one day and they are gone the next. There seems to be a consensus that their pulmonary vascular systems aren’t developing as quickly as the cattle can grow. If you stop and think about it, we are making these cattle obese before slaughter. We feed them longer, so we can reach that financial target of a 990-lb. carcass that grades Choice or better. And then we breed for bigger ribeyes when consumers really don’t want them.
Animal health was discussed quite a bit and genomics is starting to tell us a lot about these cattle and things like bovine respiratory disease, BRD. They say that BRD costs the industry a billion dollars a year in death loss. A lot of guys were saying that their animal health costs have doubled over the past 10 years and their death loss has gone up. What’s with that?
We have well-established vaccination protocols in place for the industry. The animal heath companies made sure of that, but cattlemen still must use them. Cattlemen have done a fantastic job with genetics with the help of the BIF, but I see a new direction coming and that is to keep more cattle alive through the entire process. It’s hard for a rancher to lose a 500-lb. calf but it’s even harder for a cattle feeder to lose a 1,450-lb. steer that’s worth $1,750. Perhaps we need to talk about efficient, healthy growth now. — PETE CROW
“We’ve got enough growth in cattle. And now the adverse effects of all that growth are entering the picture, which are costly.”
