ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 24, 1996 TAG: 9602260029
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Learning how to live with today's low prices in the historically up-and-down cattle business apparently was on the minds of many farmers attending the Virginia Beef Industry Convention on Friday.
How long the low prices will hang around was a question on many lips, said Reggie Reynolds, executive secretary of the Virginia Cattlemen's Association based in Daleville.
In the past two years, beef producers have seen the price of cattle drop 30 percent because of a combination of too many cattle on the market and higher feed prices. A 500-pound heifer, for example, that sold two years ago in the high $70s or low $80s per hundred pounds sells today for $45 to $48.
Many of the 600 people who signed up for this year's convention at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center paused to listen to a panel discussion on "survival strategies."
Bill McKinnon of Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who moderated the panel, said the beef industry "desperately" needs a good national corn crop this year to help get prices back up. Feedlots that buy farmers' cattle have passed along the cost of soaring corn prices to farmers in the form of lower cattle prices.
A leveling off in consumer demand also has hurt prices, McKinnon said. More pounds of beef spread among the same or fewer consumers doesn't help prices, he said. McKinnon predicted that it would be 1998, after a decline in the size of herds, before farmers would begin to see prices turn around.
McKinnon asked those on the panel - farmers and feedlot operators - how they planned to cope with low prices in the meantime.
Warren Weibert, operator of a feedlot in Oberlin, Kan., said one of the main things he can do - acknowledging farmers wouldn't want to hear it - is to pay less for cattle. He also would feed cattle for fewer days, helping keep beef tonnage off the market, he said.
It also helps for producers to track the performance of their cattle from the field through the slaughterhouse to see which production techniques are working.
Farmers have to be careful that they have a product that meat packers will take, added Howard Scarff, a cattle buyer and feedlot operator. "If they're low-grade, bottom-end cattle, I don't want them at any price," he said.
Several panel members called for increased communication among farmers, middlemen and others in the cattle marketing chain as a way to improve the overall quality of the beef product.
Beef producers need to be better marketers of their products, said Chip Snead, a part-time farmer and Roanoke's public safety director. "Traditionally, we've talked more about production and less about marketing," he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. Future cattleman Jeremy Matney checksby CNBout the calf feed at the Virginia Beef Industry Convention at the
Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center on Friday. Jeremy's parents,
Keith and Linda Matney, own a ranch in Tazewell.