News Update
February 20, 2013
Northwest Florida Beef Conference February 21
The Northwest Florida Beef Conference & Trade Show will be hosted Thursday, February 21st at the Jackson County Agriculture Conference Center, located at 2741 Pennsylvania Ave. in Marianna, Fla. The program is scheduled to begin at 7:30 a.m. CST and will conclude with lunch, followed by an optional Cool Season Forage Tour at the North Florida Research and Education Center. There is a $5 per person registration fee for this event, payable at the door. Participants are asked to preregister by calling 850-482-9620.
The focus of the 2013 edition of the beef conference will be keeping beef herds sustainable. Topics to be presented include cattle market & input cost outlook; feed, pasture and reproduction management; and a rancher panel. There will also be a trade show with exhibits by industry representatives that provide products and services for beef cattle ranchers.
Cattle Industry Watchful Of Beef Demand’s
Effect On Consumer Preferences
The pressure for higher wholesale and retail beef prices is expected to increase through 2014, and that is leading to concern among some in the beef industry.
“I often get asked whether or not beef prices will go so high that consumers will quit buying beef, but I don’t believe there is much danger of people entirely stopping their consumption,” said Derrell Peel, Oklahoma State University (OSU) Cooperative Extension livestock marketing specialist.
A degree of industry unease about beef demand is understandable. The expected decrease in beef production in 2013 will likely represent a 3.3% decrease in domestic per-capita supplies. The decrease could be even more pronounced in 2014 with consumers potentially facing another 5% decrease in domestic per capita beef supplies.
“Fortunately, beef includes many different specific products; the question is more about how consumers will adjust the mix of products and total expenditure on beef rather than their likelihood of stopping consumption entirely,” Peel said.
One of the ongoing concerns is the slow recovery of beef demand from the 2009-2010 economic recession. Middle-meat demand was weakened the most as consumers switched from steaks to hamburger and other value cuts. In that process, a higher percent of total carcass value was borne by the end meats, such as Chuck and Round portions of the carcass.
“In 2011 and 2012, middle-meat values advanced along with end-meat values, thus maintaining the relatively large contribution of end-meats to total value,” Peel said. “Though it has been a slow process, beef demand has recovered from the recession.”
The All Fresh beef demand index provided by the Livestock Marketing Information Center shows significant recovery from the 2010 lows. The 2012 annual beef demand index level is near levels not seen since 2008. The beef demand index for the fourth quarter of 2012 posted a significant increase to the highest levels since the fourth quarter of 2007.
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Web Series Will Help Farmers Reach New Markets
Farmers interested in reaching new local food markets but who are unable to attend a daylong workshop can get the same information through an online series.
Roy Ballard, Hancock County Extension educator, said the program, “MarketReady Indiana — Scaling up Your Production and Marketing of Farm Products,” is designed to help food suppliers succeed and stay profitable in a changing marketplace.
“This program will offer some basic insight into what buyers for wholesale, institutions, grocery stores and restaurants will demand,” Ballard said. “These are very different requirements than traditional direct-market consumers might have.”
Ballard said “scaling up” is a term used to describe tools and techniques needed to grow farm businesses so they can reach new markets with increased capacity.
Participants will learn from experts about expectations of food services, modern food-marketing practices, how to produce foods for sale in alternative markets and how to access resources to improve sales.
The Web-based workshop series will be offered March 11, 18 and 25. Purdue Extension offices across Indiana will host the sessions.
Participants can view the sessions at a host location and network with other farms, or they can access the sessions from a remote location with a provided URL.
UNL Increasing Investment in Agriculture
With 36 New Faculty Positions
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) is strategically increasing its investment in agriculture and natural resources, looking to hire three dozen new faculty after a decade of budget cuts and stagnant hiring.
Ronnie Green, vice chancellor of the university's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, where the faculty will be housed, said the new hires will come in subject areas filling workforce gaps critical to the global challenges of the future, including expanded and more efficient food production and improved water and natural-resources management.
The world's population is expected to increase from about 7 billion to 9 billion by 2050, and the challenges of feeding that population are significant, Green noted.
As one of the world's leading agricultural producers, Nebraska is the epicenter of these issues, and its land-grant university must be there too, Green said.
The 36 new positions, listed at http://ianrhome.unl.edu/web/ianr/growingianr, are primarily in the areas of science literacy, stress biology, computational sciences, healthy humans and healthy systems for agricultural production and natural resources.
“They cover a fairly wide range of areas across the institute addressing contemporary agricultural and natural-resource issues,” Green said.
“We are absolutely convinced that, as a university, it’s time to double down in our investment in these areas around food, fuel and water,” Green said. “All of the needs out there indicate that we need to expand our efforts to meet the challenges that are ahead.”
Green said the new faculty will be in carefully targeted areas. “We really have honed our focus to where we think it will make the biggest impact.”
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