Last week’s news story in the Irish Farmers Journal put the beef price rise in perspective. An overall fall in EU beef output of 8% in a single year explains graphically why beef prices have risen so steeply.

Throw in the lowest US cattle herd in over 50 years, coupled with beef eating being highly correlated with income and the surprise has to be that beef prices haven’t risen even more.

However, what is not clear is how much of this fall in beef output is related to the spike in world cereal prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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In the spring of 2022, wheat prices reached about €350/t with respected figures in the industry forecasting that €400/t was in sight.

In fact of course it has been downhill ever since for all grain prices.

While pig farmers suffered hugely from that sudden spike in feed prices, the cattle sector was and is much slower to react with at least 30 months from conception to slaughter and in steer, grass-based systems even more.

So it’s no real surprise that Irish beef output has so far been the most stable in Europe.

What is not realised widely is how dependent output of meat production has become on cereal, or to put it another way: how the growth in cereal production has outpaced the growth of the human population with an ever-increasing percentage of cereal output going towards animal feed (See Figure 1). With poultry now the main source of meat for human consumption, followed by pig meat, it had been assumed that the relative cheapness of pig and poultry meat would set a ceiling on beef prices.

This clearly no longer holds and it’s clear that beef is a food category in its own right.

One aspect which has received little attention in this is the in-between status of dairying and milk production.

While breeding an extra dairy cow is similar to breeding extra beef cattle, the production cycle of the actual core product milk is much more responsive to feed prices, with higher feeding in response to either high milk prices or low feed costs giving an instant response in higher output per cow. Nationally this is precisely what is happening at the moment in the US.