Greetings to you and yours on this beautiful May evening.  As promised, today's post will be the follow-up to my "Beef Demand" tirade of last week.  If you haven't read that one yet, hit the "back" button in your browser and read that first.  I believe the date was May 13th.

Aggregate beef demand speaks to one thing: how BIG the cattle market can be, or how many head of cattle are needed by entities downstream of us producers.  At first glance, that sounds like a really critical concept.  The more the better, right?  Not necessarily.  Follow me on this:

Which would you rather have:

A.  A cattle industry twice the size of today's cattle industry dominated by 6 companies that own the animals from birth to slaughter

or

B.  A cattle industry exactly the size of today's cattle industry or even a bit smaller, comprised of hundreds of thousands of successful, consistently profitable producers and their families?

I don't knkow about you, but I want scenario B.  Even if the retail guys do a wonderful job of increasing demand for beef, if you, the producer, remain incompetent, fixated on modern-day fortune tellers (aka forecasters) and doing the equivalent of playing high-stakes table games in Chicago under the false guise of "hedging", you will still go out of business, no matter how much beef demand increases.  The producers, by their own ignorance and ineptitude will force vertical integration, NOT the corporations.  This may be a traumatic moment for some of you reading this, but I suspect that deep down, you know I'm right. 

Since the mainstream analysts have no idea how to make any money in the cattle business, they arrogantly assume that profitability MUST be impossible.  And so they have completely given up on you generating consistent profit for yourself.  In their minds, the only way you can make money is if you hitch a ride on someone else's coattails.  The coattails that they are trying to catch are the retailers coattails.  That's why they are so fixated on retail level demand.  They erroneously think that if retail demand upticks, then you, the cattle producers will recognize a part of that uptick.  A rising tide lifts all boats.  Unfortunately, that thinking, besides being weak, pathetic and gutless is also completely wrong.  Upticks in beef demand will NOT, NOT, NOT bail you out.  The hole in the bottom of this industry's boat is far beyond what miniscule fluctuations in demand for a product WAY downstream is capable of bailing out. 

So, here's what I say.  BE A MAN.  Take responsibility for your own profitability.  Refuse to settle for riding on another man's coattails.  Quit worrying about everyone else's business, and for the first time in your life, start worrying about your own business.  Learn true marketing skill.  Shun fortune-teller forecasters and their impotent rhetoric of distraction.  Learn the 4th grade arithmetic necessary to be competent in this business.  If you do that, you will need never worry about beef demand ever again.  I promise.  Click over to www.BudWilliamsMarketing.com for my full calendar of schools or for my DVD.      

Forecasters are killing the North American Cattle Industry.
"Global warming" is a complete fraud designed to advance the cause of socialism and enslave humanity.
Abortion is the murder of an innocent human being and is never justified under any circumstance whatsoever.
Every human being is a question, to which the ONLY answer is Jesus Christ.   

Ann Barnhardt
Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.
www.Barnhardt.biz
888-799-4577
Ann@Barnhardt.biz

Bud Williams Marketing, Inc.
www.BudWilliamsMarketing.com
877-799-4577
Ann@BudWilliamsMarketing.com