A New Look at Beef Cattle Price Reporting Classifications

Beef production has become a series of highly specialized enterprises, consistent with technological and temporal developments throughout agriculture. Technological developments in forage and grain production, feed processing, feedlots, and transportation systems have helped physically transform the beef production industry and altered the flow patterns of beef cattle and carcass beef throughout the United States. A weanling calf produced in Virginia may be hauled to southern Georgia or Louisiana to be wintered on pasture, shipped to a Colorado feedlot for finishing, slaughtered in Colorado and the carcass shipped to Pennsylvania to a retail chain which services stores in Virginia.