Market Influences and Outlook Fall 2026

So LMIC, great tool.

I know I use it a lot for my extension work and a lot of my colleagues do.

And some of the things that we get to see as extension professionals, a little bit more than what the average producer might see, are really great for helping to talk about what the trends or what possibly if we want to call it forecasting, looking in our crystal balls of what things are going to look like.

But I've got a lot of producers right now starting to think about, you know, they're starting to pull calves to wean and we're getting ready to think about marketing calves.

But coming up with that forecast is kind of like baking a cake.

There's a lot of different ingredients that go into it.

So some of them really recently have been very interesting in the news and politics.

Let's start talking about one that comes up pretty often right now, and that's beef imports.

How do beef imports really affect our beef prices? And for those that are gonna be selling calves, how could it affect them?

Sure.

So I think, you know, looking at the beef import side of things, kind of have to keep in mind a little bit what those products are.

They're, to a degree, they're differentiated products, right? A lot of what we're importing is more of that lean product to be ground with our fat trimmings, right? So we kind of look, when we look at this stuff, we're looking at kind of what's classified as 90% lean trimmings is a lot of the product that's imported, right? That's a supply deficit that we have here domestically.

But we have a supply surplus of is the 50 percent fat trimmings.

Right.

So, you know, you think about mixing 90s with 50s and then you get your various products that you see in the retail store for ground product.

Right.

80, 20s, 90, 10s, things of that nature.

And so, you know, kind of somewhat differentiated products.

What we're looking at there, more of this ground product versus your steaks, your rounds, things that you might use for a grilling versus your your your ground beef type things.

But also think about where these products are going to.

A lot of the ground beef product typically is destined for the majority going into sort of a restaurant type setting.

Think of your fast food chains, your burger joints that you see when you're driving around town.

A lot of that product is going into those areas there.

So somewhat competing for different spaces, different demand profiles from a consumer standpoint.

And so from a price standpoint, yes, there can be some reactionary things when you hear about more imports coming in.