The 49th Annual Missouri Cattle Industry Convention and Trade Show was held earlier this month, featuring eight educational sessions as part of the event’s Cattlemen’s College. The sessions allowed producers to learn more about topics like cattle markets, productions technologies, and managing risks.

Ed Greiman, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) Cattle Marketing and International Trade Committee Chairman, led a Cattlemen’s College session on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) futures market, giving cattlemen in attendance the opportunity to learn more about how the markets became what they are today and where they may go during the upcoming years.

“We have started to see the cattle on feed numbers have dropped a little bit, and we’ve been aggressively marketing cattle, so now the real question is whether or not these calves are going to come,” said Greiman in an interview with AgWired’s Jamie Johansen following his presentation. “We think we’ve added a million cows, and if we’ve added a million cows, it’ll be interesting to see where these calves are, because we haven’t seen them yet.”

Greiman explained that he believes the fed cattle market is contributing to market volatility and described how the industry has been working to help calm that volatility through the Fed Cattle Exchange, which he hopes will work to send markets signals to the futures market and steady the trade.

“We are making sure that we’re doing our part in sending market signals to everyone who trades our cattle and trades on the futures market, and that was the whole goal of the Fed Cattle Exchange and a Wednesday sale,” he said. “It gets the trade started earlier that week, a lot of no sales from the exchange are turning around selling that afternoon or the next daye’ve been seeing a lot more wednesday and thursday trade.”

Greiman also discussed the important role exports play within the beef market: “We do import more total pounds of meat than we export, but we export more dollars,” he said. “What we have a tendency to do is to export things of higher value and products that we don’t want to use in the United States, so it’s really important to maintain those export markets.”

Listen to Jamie’s full interview with Greiman here:
Interview with Ed Greiman, NCBA