beef

Beef prices set records in 2014 due to short supplies and rising demand in the U.S. and overseas, encouraging cattle producers to chase profits by expanding their herds. Now, despite declining prices for corn, they're cutting back because slaughter cattle prices this year are forecast by USDA to be an average 18 percent lower than last year.

Four hundred of the biggest food companies in the U.S. and Europe have pledged not to buy from suppliers responsible for deforestation. But no one can say for sure whether their promises are actually protecting forests, according to a report from Climate Focus.

It could be capsulized as "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Steak." At the meat counter and online, retailers "are taking the local food craze to new heights," says the Wall Street Journal, by selling cuts of meat that can be traced to an individual animal on a specific farm. It's called "single origin" meat.

In a rare bit of positive news about the U.S. diet, Americans upped their seafood intake by a pound last year to 15.5 pounds, according to the annual Fisheries of the United States Report released by NOAA last week. Even though that only amounts to about four extra seafood meals per person per year, it constitutes the “biggest biggest leap in seafood consumption in 20 years," says NPR.

When the largest U.S. farm group sent 59 shoppers into supermarkets to check the prices of food for a fall meal, they found the tally, on average, was down by a surprisingly large eight percent from a year ago.

Due to privacy laws that have stymied regulators, no one can say for sure how many CAFOs are in the U.S., much less how large the animal operations really are, says Inside Climate News. “Thousands of industrial farms across the country release contaminants into the nation's water and airways, but in many states like North Carolina, the public has limited access to information about them."

Nearly 13 years ago, China shut its borders to U.S. beef in reaction to the first U.S. case of mad cow disease. Now, the government says it will end the ban, leaving U.S. officials and cattle producers asking for a timeline, says the Wall Street Journal.

Chinese officials in Shangdong Province have ratified the country’s first government-backed recommendations for how to slaughter chickens, says the New York Times. The guidelines, which were are not mandatory, are both an attempt to quell activists’ concerns and corner the export poultry market, which increasingly calls for more humane animal production.

The fines for safety lapses are so low that meatpacking companies have little incentive to improve working conditions, says a story by Harvest Public Media on NPR. When Ralph Horner, an employee at JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beef facility was caught on a conveyer built and chocked to death, JBS paid just $38,500 in fines. And that was more than most cases, according to Herb Gibson, director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Denver office, which sends inspectors to the massive Greeley plant. Every day, the plant’s 3,000 employees process roughly 5,600 head of cattle.

Brazil will remove barriers to U.S. beef and beef products that were imposed in 2003 in the name of preventing mad cow disease, said the Agriculture Department, pointing to “excellent long-term potential for U.S. beef exporters.”

Some 16 percent of U.S. red meat and poultry will be exported this year, a 900-million-pound increase from 2015, according to USDA estimates, which call for a modest increase in the new year. Sales were constrained last year by the strong dollar and trade barriers due to the bird flu epidemic.

Grocery shoppers will pay lower-than-expected prices for beef, poultry and dairy products, thanks to the strong dollar and larger meat production, said the monthly Food Price Outlook. For beef, the change in price would be dramatic — down by 2.5 percent this year after two years of steep increases.

The world is facing a 70-percent “crop gap” between the calories available in 2006 and the expected caloric demand in 2050, says a report out by the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Idaho farm Alex McCoy could be the ostrich evangelist of America. "I believe in the potential of ostrich to really transform the red meat industry in the United States," McCoy tells Modern Farmer.

South Africa has agreed to remove barriers to U.S. poultry, beef and pork, said U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. The United States threatened at the end of 2015 to revoke duty-free status for agricultural products from South Africa because it blocked U.S. meat. "The true test of our success will be based on the ability of South African consumers to buy American product in local stores," said Froman.

Tyson Foods, one of the largest meatpackers in the world, cannot credibly say it produces “climate-smart” beef and should be stopped from making such marketing claims, said a lawsuit filed Wednesday under the District of Columbia’s consumer protection law.