American Ag Today- 10/14/24

And welcome into a new episode of American Ag today produced by the American Ag Radio Network. I'm your host Jesse Allen. Well, August Pork exports above year ago levels, beef exports trending lower though, Dan Halstrom, US meat export Federation president and CEO first shares details on the pork numbers.

up about 6%, 239,000 metric tons. Once again, led by Mexico on a record pace year to date, Central America as well continues to see significant growth, up 31%, the lower 11,000 tons in the month of August. So segueing into Asia, Malaysia, record value and volume into Malaysia the last month and back to South America, Columbia had a record in value. And really,

If you look at South America as a whole, very, very strong month for U.S. pork exports. With the August numbers being continued strong, you look forward to the fourth quarter of the year and we're forecasting records on volume and value on the pork side globally. With the fourth quarter being our largest export volume season of the year, we should set records in both areas for pork. Beef exports were down, but there was some good news.

exports were down slightly almost 103,000 metric tons down 6% value is down just slightly 846 million dollars. But we continue to see these headwinds, economic headwinds as well as exchange rate headwinds in Asia.

But that being said, Taiwan had a very good month, saw significant growth there. We regained full market share of U.S. beef into Colombia. We had had restrictions in several states there for the last several months due to H5N1. I'm happy to report that

That is now back to full access. And now that we have full access backward, fast on the track of recovering that loss share down into Columbia, which amounts to about a $40 million market annually. And for more, please visit usmef.org. That's Stan Halstrom with the US Meat Export Federation. Well, it's a good time to think about weaning strategies for beef calves, Dr. AJ Tarpoff of Kansas State University says now is the time to plan ahead.

This is fall. Our spring-born calves were getting ready or preparing them for the next transition, right? The transition to go to a grower, to a feedlot, go into the auction barn. Now is kind of an exciting time because there's a lot happening. These calves have been growing with their mom for the last several months. They are ready for that next stage of production, but it's up to us to plan ahead, making sure that we have everything in place, that we're going to prepare these animals for the next stage of production to the best of our abilities. He talks about what that will look like.

To me, whenever I start planning out the year, I kind of base everything almost around weaning, because that's one of the big periods of time. So what I like to plan for is thinking ahead of how you are going to weed. What is your actual plan for this? Both short term and long term. Longer term, how long are you going to hold these animals?

Is your plan to wean these animals have a true maternal separation from mom? Are you going to hold on to them for a period of time that we often refer to as preconditioning? If so, planning today and maybe even starting today with some of the preconditioning programs, right? Getting with your veterinarian, you might have to do some pre-weaning vaccination schedules. And what might be included in those schedules?

That would include some modified live vaccines, some multivalent cluster ideal, and even some of our background products like a manheimia. But again, work with your local veterinarian. They'll have those recommendations for you. This also is a great time prior to weaning. We may actually deworm these animals to make sure that we clean out any of those efficiency, robbing internal parasites that we can clean those calves up and have them prepared for a ration and to be able to gain up to their potentials.

That's Dr. AJ Tarpoff from Kansas State University. Well, during the 2024 Farm Fest in Minnesota, one of the presentations in the Forum tent included tips for surviving in a down economy. One of the presenters, Todd Stensel, a farm business management professor at South Central College in Minnesota says one of the best things producers can do is develop a solid marketing plan.

I think one of the things it points to from a management perspective is we think about getting through the next few tough years is you really need to have a marketing plan to take advantage of these opportunities should they arise. I got a colleague at us at the University of Minnesota that has the eleventh commandment in grain marketing. That's don't hold on price grain after July 1, and unfortunately this is a year that proved the eleventh commandment right.

And in a typical year, commodity prices fall the closer the calendar is to harvest. I guess if you look at the statistics, three out of four years we're going to see price go down from July 1st to harvest. There's always that exception and we've seen it, but it didn't happen this year. So thinking about a marketing plan that involves pre-harvest marketing when the price is right, that you can make a profit. Think about post-harvest marketing opportunities is an important part of managing through the times we're in.

Once again, that's Todd Stensel with South Central College in Minnesota. Once we continue to watch the devastation in the wake of Hurricane Milton moving across Florida. One of the key concerns for agriculture is U.S. fertilizer production infrastructure that has been impacted by Hurricane Milton. Josh Lindville, vice president of fertilizer at Stone X, says the industry mostly dodged a bullet with Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago.

But that's not the case with milked. When you talk about fertilizer in the U.S., you're talking about Florida. It's the fossil market in general. We always talk about generalities like North America, faucet production or U.S. faucet production. When we make statements like that, we're talking about Florida. Florida is where it all is. Now, there are some smaller minds out there and those minds are fantastic for those regions, but we look at the overall numbers.

Florida into your point, this storm path has it dead to rights in its cross areas. And I think it happened over the next, say, 48 hours, but as of right now, it just doesn't get a whole lot worse than what they're predicting today. Now we like to always say, say Florida, they know hurricanes come. It's a part of their DNA. And so when you build these types of facilities, you build them with hurricanes in mind with

winds and maybe even some storm surge, but she's the only engineer so much. I mean, if this thing comes across as a category four or five, it's really hard to perceive a situation where there isn't some amount of damage to the facilities. Linville says it's not the facilities that are even the biggest concern. It's more the people. Your facility can come through largely unscathed. But if your people's homestead, their families and things like that, if everything is wrecked there, that's where their attention needs to be placed. Those people need to be at home, cleaning up, getting their families somewhere safe, getting them fed and everything else.

Bear essentials that takes precedence over running a facility so even if the damage to the facilities are not what some are fearing today if it is on the personal side it doesn't matter it may be the exact same effect which is very unfortunate given the word less than 30 days away from November which is start of fall application.

meantime, Craig Rule, vice president of crop nutrients for grow marks as his customers will be impacted because of the phosphate mines in Florida that have been impacted by Hurricane Milton. And Rule says there's never a good time for such a store event to occur. But in this case, the timing couldn't be much worse. Normal cropping cycle, you know, we wait for the harvest to occur so the fields are open and that's when phosphate applications start. Anybody that's been out driving on the countryside understands that that is starting now.

And when we talk about production interruptions like we could see in Florida, a lot of people don't understand that you can never make up for that supply. Like the date that those plants won't run through this storm and during the recovery period, that production will never be able to be caught up through any meat. So it's just lost forever.

Rules says a significant loss of phosphate will lead to much higher costs at a time when farmers are already working with high input costs and low commodity prices. And with that, we are out of time on this episode of American Ag Today produced by the American Ag Radio Network. Thank you for joining us. I'm your host Jesse Allen wishing you and yours a great rest of your day.