Cattle Market Notes Week Ending February 24, 2017

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Cattle Quick Thoughts

The Central Mississippi Producer Advisory Council Meeting was held in Raymond on February 22nd. This meeting was designed to give producers across all commodities the opportunity to discuss issues important to their operations and that they would like MSU to look into. One piece of feedback I received in the beef room is that this Cattle Market Notes Newsletter should include prices for feedstuffs and for more weight classes of cattle in Mississippi auctions than just the 450-500 and 750-800 ranges listed below. This is a good comment! While I only include a few weight classes in the text of this newsletter to conserve space, prices for the full set of weight classes for MS steers and heifers (along with prices from other states, feedstuffs, cull prices, and historical trends) are available in a Google spreadsheet online by clicking HERE . This document is updated each week and a link is included in each newsletter after the cash cattle section.

Cash Cattle:

Cash traded fed cattle rallied this week up $5.41 to an average of $124.38 for live sales compared to $118.97 last week. Dressed steers were up even higher to an average of $195.92 this week, an increase of $8.48 over last week. Trade volume was just over 119,000 head which was up significantly from last week’s total of 14,159 head.

Mississippi feeder steers weighing 450-500 pounds held steady at $143.50 while 750-800 pound steers were up $3 to $118.50 compared to $115.50 last week. Feeder prices in Oklahoma City for 500-550 pound steers were down 86 cents to $160.70 and OKC 750-800 pound steers averaged $128.95 which was up a nickel over last week.

[ … For more in depth Livestock Prices and Production data and trends CLICK HERE …  ]

Futures:

The Cattle on Feed report was released on Friday afternoon and had an impact on end of the week futures prices (I’ll post in-depth cattle on feed comments on the Ag Econ blog early next week).  April live cattle were up 32 cents over last week to $115.10 while June live cattle were down 22 cents to $104.95. March feeder cattle were down $1.82 from last Friday at $122.15 while April futures were down $2.22 on the week at $121.95. Corn futures prices were down slightly this week with March and May corn futures each down 4 cents at $3.64 and $3.71, respectively.

Beef:                                                                                          

Wholesale boxed beef prices were up this week with Choice boxes averaging $194.48, up $5.55 from a week ago. Select boxes ended the week with an average of $191.87, an increase of $4.19 from last week. The choice-select spread increased to $2.61.

Note: all cattle and beef prices are quoted in dollars per hundredweight and corn prices are quoted in dollars per bushel unless stated otherwise.