The fattening of cattle in feedlot. Concern in the sector due to drought and costs / web
The images broadcast on television of dead cows in the fields due to lack of water shocked many of the inhabitants of Argentine cities, who may think that the serious crisis in livestock production is due solely to the drought. However, the problem is much deeper, since for years government decisions have harmed the sector, because they were generally aimed at artificially lowering the price of meat. The most diverse methods were tested: price fixing, prohibition or quota of exports, withholdings, etc.
By preventing the value of meat from increasing like that of other foods, social moodiness is attenuated and therefore it is regularly resorted to. Thus, while the average index of the value of food and non-alcoholic beverages had an increase of 5.5%, the rump and the rump did so by 2.5% and minced meat fell 2.09% during the month of last december. In November the cost of meat to the consumer increased 1%, while the basket of food that the State takes to prepare said index rose 3.1%.
This was not an isolated phenomenon, because from October 2021 to October 2022 the increase in meat was 71.8%, while the aforementioned basket grew 88%.
The producers suffered the decrease in their income because, in many cases, they were forced to sell calves or steers before fattening due to the almost disappearance, if not the disappearance of pastures (rolls), due to little or no rainfall. These circumstances will determine a drop in production that will be felt next year, reflected in lower supply in butcher shops and very possibly with abrupt price increases.
fewer animals
In this 2023 the number of cattle will be reduced because the slaughter would exceed 25% of the total staff, which was 53.4 million at the beginning of the cycle, without counting the deaths due to lack of water. To replace these animals this year, 15 million calves should be incorporated, a figure that can hardly be reached since the production peak was in 2019 with 14.95 million. To start the recovery of the number of cows, credits will be needed so that the farmers have the necessary working capital to repopulate the fields, but with rates that reflect the problem caused by the delay in the price of meat and the cost of recovering pastures. and planted with fodder. The deterioration process has had as a consequence that in the last thirty years many farmers abandon the activity to dedicate themselves to agriculture.
From the Argentine Rural Society they affirm that in the coming months there will be a marked decrease in pregnant bovine bellies, impacting on the availability of calves for weaning in 2024, as well as on the shortening of grazing rearing, thus lowering the future weight of slaughter. All this translates into the impossibility of having a greater supply of meat in the following two years.
Even those entrepreneurs who adopted the modality called “feedlot” (which is reported separately) could not escape the deterioration of the activity, since with this system that is characterized by feeding the animals with grains, there was an increase in corn that 25 thousand pesos per ton in a year came to cost 45 thousand pesos, while cattle did so in a much lower proportion. That is why the kilos that the animals gained in weight had a much higher cost than what was demanded for their fattening.
Decreasing
Argentina has gone from being the leading meat exporter to occupying fifth place and its competitors are gaining markets while Argentina is losing them. Failure to comply with contracts due to government decisions by prohibiting or quotaing exports will have repercussions for many years in Argentine livestock activity. The deterioration is such that the country’s participation in Mercosur meat sales to the rest of the world has been reduced and Uruguay, for example, already exports more than half of what Argentina does despite the differences in the territorial extensions of each of those countries. Of course, the refrigeration industry suffers from these vicissitudes despite the fact that many Argentine companies have achieved international standards to be able to comply with all the sanitary requirements in countries as rigorous in this regard as Germany.
The province of Buenos Aires will not emerge unscathed from the crisis of the livestock activity either, since in a good part of its territory the inhabitants are dedicated to it and the economic movement of cities and towns is influenced to a large extent by the luck of the producers, without Count on the generation of employment generated by the activity when it uses its full capacity.
