In March, cattle slaughter collapsed 20%, but the markets are depressed and cattle prices continue to lag behind in Argentina

Frozen Bone-In Beef

Meat

Argentina

Market & Price Trends

Published Mar 28, 2024

Tridge summary

The article highlights a significant 27% decrease in cattle shipments to slaughterhouses in March compared to the previous year, with numbers falling from 1,274,616 to 927,725 heads. This decline is primarily due to improved grass growth conditions and a trend among farmers to retain livestock, reducing the availability of cattle, particularly steers and cows, for slaughter. Despite this drop in supply, there hasn't been a corresponding increase in farm and meat prices, which have risen much less than inflation. This situation points to a consumption crisis and export competitiveness issues, casting doubt on the sustainability of the recent record meat exports celebrated by the Ministry of Agriculture in February.

Disclaimer: The above summary was generated by a state-of-the-art LLM model and is intended for informational purposes only. It is recommended that readers refer to the original article for more context.

Original content

Treasury shipments to work reported by Senasa show a resounding drop this month. The year-on-year reduction is 27%. It should be noted that March had 19 working days, and if it had had the 21 work days that the third month of 2023 had, the reduction in work would have been 20%. In any case, it is a very high brake on beef production. In the third month of last year, shipments of cattle to slaughterhouses had been 1,274,616 heads, compared to 927,725 in the same month of 2024, for which today's data still needs to be computed. What is added will be irrelevant taking into account the long holiday: business today was scarce. Two factors strongly influenced this brake on work. The first is the change in the climatic situation. Last year, the slaughter was inflated by the drought that forced from the beginning of the year to remove the breeding calves early and to send still productive bellies (cows) and other categories to the slaughterhouses to alleviate the load per hectare. This ...

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