November 29, 2000

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman Tuesday announced a new rule that requires large cattle, swine and lamb packers and importers to provide contract information, including pricing, for public dissemination. The new reporting should provide information on 80-95% of all cattle, boxed beef, slaughter hog, sheep, lamb meat, and imported lamb meat transactions.

Under the new rule, packers who annually slaughter an average of 125,000 cattle or 100,000 swine or slaughter or process an average of 75,000 lambs are required to report to USDA transaction details involving purchases and sales of livestock, boxed beef, boxed lamb, and lamb carcasses. Importers who annually import an average of 5,000 metric tons of lamb meat products also must report.

New market news reports available to the public will include information covering the prior day swine market, forward contract and formula marketing arrangement cattle purchases, packer-owned cattle and sheep information, sales of imported boxed lamb cuts, and live lamb premiums and discounts. In some instances, information already being collected under the current voluntary market news reporting program will now be required.

In order to assist packers and importers required to report information under the new rule, USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service will provide technical assistance and training to ensure compliance with the electronic data transmission requirements of the rule. The final rule will be published Friday in the Federal Register and be implemented 60 days later. Further information is available on the web at: http://www.ams.usda.gov/lsg/price.htm.

"This is a major step that will improve the market negotiating position of family farmers and ranchers," said National Cattlemen's Beef Association President George Hall, a cattle producer from Mustang, OK. "It gives producers a leg up without stifling the marketplace. Price reporting will greatly increase access to marketing information, much of which has never before been available to producers."

USDA also is working to finalize a rule that mandates price reporting for exports. The proposed rule calls for meat exporters to report volume for all fresh and frozen meat, and USDA will collect and publish the information. A pilot program to use scanner data to report retail beef prices also is underway.