Beef Exports Strong To Start 2020

The first two months of the calendar year showed significant year over year increased of U.S. beef exports to Japan: both by volume and by value. That includes offerings such as chilled beef and mussel cuts. But as Jared Brackett of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board notes, Japan is also a valuable markets for cuts that US customers usually do not purchase at the supermarket or the grocery store.

"I don’t eat a lot of tongue in my family or ranch but Japanese happen to really love tongue and that adds about $12 to every animal we sell," Brackett noted.

And Japan is not the only export buying tongue, offal, and other domestically underutilized US beef product. The CBB's Hugh Sandberg noted beef lips bound for Mexico catch roughly $1.60 per pound. He added these exports are of great benefit to American producers, especially when it comes to non high end cuts.

"If we weren’t doing that, a lot of those would go in to rendering and we would be getting very little value out of them. So the export market is critical to us."

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