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The Changing Market Structure For The American Beef Industry

Abstract

I. Introduction

Change is now a common everyday word in the beef marketing. Change spells out "Cattlemen Have A New Great Encore." You and I are witnessing this encore as the beef industry divides into two distinctly different marketing systems based on two distinctly different production systems.

First, we have the traditional beef system producing and marketing commodity beef. Second, we have a value-based beef system producing and marketing high quality beef designed to meet tight consumer specifications. A critical decision that today's beef cow producers have to make is to decide which system - commodity beef or value-based beef - they are going to target their production towards. The beef industry's transition into value-based marketing is generating rapid change in today's beef industry.

Today's beef industry has roughly 800,000 beef cow producers marketing to 2100 feedlots; who in turn, are marketing to 4 major beef packers who are marketing to 250 million plus domestic consumers.² In spite of the wide spread belief that agriculture in general, and the beef industry in particular, are different from other U.S. industries, today's beef industry is also caught up in the U.S. economy's overall drive for efficiency. Consumers are demanding value in anything and everything they purchase. He who can produce the beef that consumers want, in the form that they want it, when they want it, at the lowest price wins.

¹ Harlan Hughes is Livestock Economist and Professor Emeritus, North Dakota State University. Paper presented at Western Animal Science Symposium entitled "Using Science And Marketing In Producing And Delivering Value Added Products For The Consumer" Bozeman, Montana June 20, 2001.