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Rebuilding the U.S. Cowherd: Rethinking the Way Industry Selects and Develops Replacements
The U.S. beef industry is confronted with a significant long-term decline in cattle numbers driven in part by record input costs and severe drought conditions in many major cattle producing states. These recent challenges only add to the long-term issues the industry has faced which include an aging producer population, increased global competition, increased competition from other meat proteins, weak domestic demand for beef and a perceived lack of economic incentives to expand the cattle herd. The weakness in beef demand provided the impetus for the industry to begin the Beef Quality Assurance program. Although the industry has experienced more consistency in beef products over the last three decades, there are major strides left when today less than 5 percent of cattle grade prime. In comparison to other domestic livestock sectors in the U.S., tradition and segmentation within the U.S. cattle industry has hindered the adoption of newer production and marketing strategies. Coordinating the various industry segments (cow-calf, stocker, feed yard, processor) with allied industry (AI companies, seed stock suppliers, feed and pharmaceutical industries) offers the potential to enhance technology adoption and contribute to increases in production efficiency. As the U.S. cattle industry moves to rebuild its declining numbers, the focus of much of the industry will turn to heifer retention and appropriate practices related to beef heifer development. The industry has provided better beef quality signal transmission through available marketing grids in the industry today. Yet, these grids generally require cow-calf producers to maintain some ownership stake in the cattle through the feed yard. Producers that have invested in developing higher quality cattle and beef in the past often found genetic improvement to be slow and inconsistent, which often times reduced economic incentives of the quality focus. The technologies that have come online over the past few years and new genomic advances on the horizon appear poised to rapidly increase genetic improvement and consistency. The combination of better market incentives for higher quality beef coupled with technologies that allow producers to more easily invest in genetics focused on quality provide the industry a unique opportunity to increase the cow herd with a more refined focus on the genetic potential of the herd as it relates to efficiency and higher quality. It would appear these technologies have the added value of reducing producer risk by providing more consistency in the beef produced.
Keywords: Economic, Quality, Technologies