Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The difference between the selling price for live cattle and the costs of purchasing feeder cattle and feed (usually assumed to be corn, regardless of actual mix of feed used) is referred to as livestock gross margin (LGM), feeding margin, or cattle crush (as opposed to production margin, which also includes other production costs). [21]
Feeder cattle or store cattle are young cattle soon to be either backgrounded or sent to fattening, most especially those intended to be sold to someone else for finishing before butchering. In some regions, a distinction between stockers and feeders (by those names) is the distinction of backgrounding versus immediate sale to a finisher.
Live cattle is a type of futures contract that can be used to hedge and to speculate on fed cattle prices. Cattle producers, feedlot operators, and merchant exporters can hedge future selling prices for cattle through trading live cattle futures, and such trading is a common part of a producer's price risk management program. [1]
This simple method is sometimes used for cattle. The number of animal units represented by one or more head of cattle may be calculated by dividing their total body mass in kg by 454 (or dividing their weight in pounds by 1000). Thus an 800-pound steer would be considered equivalent to 0.8 animal units. [4] Estimation based on metabolic body size.
An animal unit is the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of "live" animal weight. [1] A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1,000 meat cows, 2,500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.
The adjacent western provinces and northern US states are similar, so the use of corn as cattle feed has been limited at these northern latitudes. As a result, few cattle are raised on corn as a feed. The majority are raised on grass and finished on cold-tolerant grains such as barley. [61] This has become a marketing feature of the beef. [9]
In 1997, in response to outbreaks of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, the United States and Canada banned a range of animal tissues from cattle feed. Feed bans in United States (2009) Canada (2007) expanded on this, prohibiting the use of potentially infectious tissue in all animal and pet food and fertilizers.
Most cattle from these regions are exported as manufacturing beef or as live animals under 350 kilograms live weight to South-East Asia for fattening in feedlots there. Weaner calves for sale by auction. A variety of selling methods are used in Australia and cattle may be sold as studs, store or finished stock.