Labor Day grilling, strengthening exports and declining herd numbers converged to create a run on beef cattle last week before prices pulled back somewhat Tuesday.
Buyers for the Big Four packers that control about 80 percent of beef processing — Tyson, National Beef, Cargill and JBS, a Brazilian meat giant that acquired Swift — worked late into the night Aug. 18 bidding up beef futures prices to 99 cents a pound.
Then buy bids jumped the next morning to $1, the highest level in three months.
"It was kind of a perfect storm — for the short term and fairly longer term as well," said Kevin Good, a senior market analyst with Denver-based CattleFax, a market research organization.
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