Producers and packers have been at odds over “fair” cattle price discovery ever since the first steer traded hands to be slaughtered off-farm. For decades, producers have claimed that fewer, but larger, packing companies exerted disproportionate leverage in the price discovery process.
Concerns boiled over in recent years as the spread between fed cattle prices and beef prices hit record levels. From January 2010 until August 2015, monthly price spreads averaged $34 per cwt according to USDA’s Economic Research Service. From September 2015 through the end of 2018, price spreads…
