How much price drop on live cattle and calves?
Again assuming that U.S. consumption reasonable holds, and that we lose most of the export market for some period, a 15% drop in live cattle prices would put them back into the higher $70s per live hundredweight, or a drop of maybe $12 to $15 per hundredweight. Calf prices would be somewhat more maybe more in the $15 to $18 range. • How long might this impact last? The length of impact will heavily depend on how quickly we can open foreign markets (as well as the unknown evolution of the BSE story in coming weeks). Thus, the time frame is unknown. We do know that Canada has been in the process of trying to get the world to take their beef for over 7 months now. Perhaps the U.S. and Canada working together can encourage the world to move more quickly now. My personal guess is that it will be months and not weeks. For my estimates of impact I am using 6 months. This seems to be somewhat consistent with price action on live cattle futures at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. • Will BSE USA
