@cfcattle1: I've seen people stopped arguing about the beef and started arguing about everything else on the animal. fyi: Drop is the packer's word for everything that is not the carcass. The hide, the tallow, the tongue, the tripe, the organs, the bones ground into meal. When the steer is sold, all of that stays with the packer. Here is what it is worth right now. USDA put the steer drop value at $15.12 per hundredweight of live animal in mid-October 2026. On a 1,400-pound steer, that is $211.68, call it $212 a head. The hide alone is $24.50 of it, for a branded butt steer hide. Those who say the producer never sees a cent of it are right about one thing. There is no drop line on the settlement sheet. The check shows one live price, and the drop never appears as its own number. But that is not the whole story. Someone made the other side's case, and he has a point: the cattleman is winning. A 1,400-pound steer at recent live prices is worth about $3,060, and the $212 drop is about 7 percent on top of that. The packer buys the whole animal and sells it in pieces, so the price he can bid reflects the meat plus the drop, minus his costs. The drop supports the bid. Scale changes everything. A small custom shop in the thread says it costs him $4 in salt to get $3 for a hide. With no volume and no hide buyer coming around, a hide can be near worthless. At a packing plant buying thousands of head, that same hide is $24.50. Same animal, different market. Look at your last settlement sheet. Is there a drop line on it, or one live price? Tell us what yours shows. #RanchLife #CattleRanch #KnowYourNumbers #BeefIndustry

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Monday 26 October 2026 19:43:38 GMT