You can attribute part of the decline in the price of commodity beef cattle to falling world auto sales The Wall Street Journal said. Demand for leather interiors has fallen along with car sales and has taken down the liveweight price of cattle. Hides, tallow and organ meats make up what is called the "drop credit" in pricing cattle with hides typically making up 60% of this.. Through the late second-quarter of 2008, the drop credit contributed $150 to $200 a head to the packer. This allowed large-scale packers to pass virtually all of the retail price through to the cattle finisher as the packer could make his money on the drop credit. Now, that credit is down to $80 to $85 and the packer has to actually make some money selling meat. Of course, this comes out of the cattle finisher’s price. Car interiors were 12% of the world use of leather in 2007 but are only 8% in 2009. While world leather demand is expected to increase with a revived economy, automotive demand will probably never regain its former percentage due to the world’s shift to smaller cars.

Scientists working with Group Danone, the owner of Dannon Yogurt have found that cows consuming diets high in omega-3 fatty acids emit considerably less methane than those fed hay, corn and soybean meal, The New York Times reported on June 4. The scientists were trying to discover why French cows were so much healthier and produced more milk in the spring and found that it was the high level omega-3 fatty acid that naturally occurs in fast growing pasture that soothed the cows’ digestive tract. This allows it to operate smoothly and emit less methane gas. Unfortunately, few American dairy cows are allowed to direct graze fresh pasture anymore. Hay and silage contains very little omega-3 fatty acids because the fat is highly volatile and is destroyed in the curing process. Consequently, the only viable American solution is seen as the feeding of very expensive flax oil imported from Europe. Flax oil is very high in omega-3. Unfortunately, it is not grown in the USA and there are no processing mills anywhere in North America. While admittedly this will increase production costs to dairymen, their milk purchasers see it as a potential major public relations coup that will get cows out of the environmentalists gun sights. However, the real winner in this research will be pasture-based agriculture. The more the American consumer learns about the benefits of direct-grazing in both human and animal health, the more she is going to like it.

Cattle Fax said the American feedyard business is currently about 20% too big to be profitable. Cow numbers have declined for 11 of the last 13 years and 2009 is expected to continue this trend. At the same time, bunk capacity in commercial feedyards has been expanding. Attempts to maintain capacity have caused feedyards to pay too much for feeder cattle and this has resulted in severe financial losses. Some smaller feedyards have been converting to grow-out yards for stockers and dairy replacements but much more capacity idling will be necessary for cattle feeding to be profitable. The American packing industry, facing the same dwindling cattle supply, has been aggressively closing plants. Today, Cattle Fax estimates packing capacity is only 10% overbuilt. Cattle Fax said the bottom line is that profits come from maintaining margins and not from increasing volume. This is something all of us should remember.

Those weeds in your pasture could be a valuable new source of cash flow reports The Wall Street Journal. Greens are "trendy items" in haute cuisine these days and edible weeds are what has gourmands really excited. Edible weeds currently sell for $3 per six ounce bunch and their prices have been rising by 20% each year. Until the mid-20th Century, weeds such as wild onion, pokeweed and sorrel were widely eaten in the USA. Burdock is useful in soups and stews and the stalk is said to similar in taste and appearance to celery. Chickweed is mild flavored and is readily used in salads. Dandelion greens lose their bitterness if soaked in cold water and can be used in salads or cooked like spinach. Kudzu leaves can be battered and fried. In Asia, kudzu roots are made into a valuable flour. Lamb’s quarters’ leaves can be cooked as an alternative to spinach, which belongs to the same plant family. Purslane leaves, stems and flowers may be stewed or eaten raw. The succulent stems can be pickled and the purslane ashes can be used as a salt substitute. Shepherd’s purse adds a peppery kick to salads or can be added to a cooked ‘mess of greens.’ Dawn Jackson Blatner of the American Dietetic Association said that eating weeds is healthy because it taps you into the plants’ matrix of immune systems that protect weeds from the sun, the wind and the bugs. "One man’s weed is another man’s wonder food," she said.

Organic dairy sales growth has stopped according to The New York Times. In fact, the USDA said that organic milk sales actually fell by 2.5 percent and reduced-fat milk by 15 percent in a February 2009 to February 2008 comparison. This has something to do with the economy but it also has something to do with the consumer’s growing realization that organic certification does not necessarily mean a healthy product nor a truthful one. The recent organic peanut scare brought to the public the fact that organic certifiers are paid by the people they certify and therefore have no interest in blowing the whistle on any patently unsafe practices they may see. Recently three American Certified Organic fertilizer companies were found to have laced their products with commercial nitrogen, genetically modified cotton from India was imported as organic, "California" organic salad greens were found to really be from China and an organic baby shampoo from Australia was found to contain skin-irritating chemicals. In dairy products, the continuing exposure that much of the nation’s organic milk does not come from small, pasture-based, organic farms but from large feedlot based industrial dairies in the West has many consumers questioning the true value of organic milk.. I would say that until Certified Organic actually means something healthy and farmed in nature’s image, the jig is up for the USDA’s Certified Organic label and its proto-industrial suppliers.

The reaction to 2008's high grain prices is still reverberating through the world economy according to The Economist. China and the Middle Eastern oil countries became terrified of the export grain embargoes several countries declared during last summer’s grain shortage. They were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to buy grain at any price. To avoid future dependence upon grain exporting countries, they are buying up millions of acres of farmland in Africa to grow food staples like wheat, corn and rice. It is expected that this will allow the Middle East will become independent of the world grain market within a few years. Oil deficient China is also investing in African palm oil plantations for bio-fuel. Saudi Arabia temporarily became self-sufficient in wheat production with massive irrigation projects in the 1980's but closed them when they realized this was exhausting their irreplaceable ground water supplies. Peter Brabeck-Letmanthe, the chairman of Nestle, said the purchases "weren’t about land, but water." He called the land purchases "the great water grab." China and South Korea are realizing their domestic water resources are growing ever shorter and that they cannot continue to increase domestic food production. The world water shortage is likely to be a far more serious problem for the world economy than the more widely forecasted shortage of petroleum.