Growing ovine capacity driving shifting markets
Lamb markets closed 2024 with a bang and opened 2025 with a whimper. The rally in December had the usual hallmarks of a supply squeeze, while hot and dry weather over the break has seen supply restored. For sheep, we might be seeing the opposite in terms of supply. Regular readers will remember us bemoaning […]
Benign cereal and volatile canola
Now that harvest is nearly complete and traders are back from holidays, markets should be starting to fire up again Producers who went to the beach bemoaning the fall in canola prices might have come back to a nice rally, while wheat and barley have shown remarkably little volatility. Not a lot has happened in […]
History of the Southern hemisphere sheep flock
The recent AWPFC forecast for wool production to be down to levels of the early 1920s (and 2019) warrants a look at what has been happening to sheep flocks in Australia and the other major southern hemisphere wool exporters. Wool production and sheep numbers are not necessarily correlated. On a world basis, as the IWTO […]
Record exports buoyed by big US appetite
Australian beef export volumes reached new highs in 2024 and are set to continue climbing in 2025. Our domestic beef herd reached maturation last year, driving up slaughter and moving us into the destocking stage of the cycle, with the female slaughter rate averaging 51% for the first three quarters of the year. This lift […]