1. Market Overview and the Honest Cattle Market Index

1.1  The Index This Week

Honest Cattle Market Index: 133.9, week ending September 5, 2026, computed September 8. The base is the 2024 calendar-year average set to 100, so 133.9 means Montana cattle revenue conditions are running 33.9 percent above what they averaged in 2024. One point equals one percent of that 2024 average, so a two-point move is a two percent move. The index was essentially flat on the week, down 0.2 points. Rising means improving price conditions. It measures revenue conditions, not profit, and it is neither advice nor a forecast. Full methodology: honestcattle.net/2026/06/23/montana-cattle-index.

This is a provisional print, and it is worth explaining what that means — because Honest Cattle has Montana auction prices this week that are fresher than the ones inside this number. Billings Livestock sold 2,020 head last Thursday and those prices are in Section 6. They are not in the index. The index’s two futures legs are current to Friday’s settlements; its two Montana cash legs are still carried at the most recent statewide USDA figure, which posts Monday or Tuesday.

Honest Cattle went looking for a fix this week and found something more useful than the fix. The obvious answer is to build the Montana cash legs from the individual barn reports, which publish within a day of each sale instead of the following Monday — Billings Livestock on Thursday, Public Auction Yards on Wednesday, Miles City on Tuesday. We built that and ran it. Here is what it showed.

On cull cows it works, and it is better than what the index uses now. The barn composite prices boner cows at $155.00 across 740 head, against USDA’s statewide $156.37 across 186 head — four times the sample, a dollar and a third apart, and available four days sooner.

On the steer leg it does not work, and the reason is the real story. There were zero head of weaned 600–649 pound Montana steers sold last week — not at Billings, not at Public Auction Yards, not at Miles City, and none in USDA’s statewide roll-up either. Statewide, weaned steers of any weight came to 116 head. The 600–649 bracket had 12 head, all unweaned, at $379.19. The steer leg is not carrying because USDA is slow. It is carrying because that class of cattle is barely trading in Montana in mid-September. No change of source fixes that.

Two things follow. First, the cow leg will move to the barn composite once Honest Cattle has measured the gap between the two sources across several weeks rather than one — a leg that jumps because the source changed, then snaps back when USDA posts, is worse than one that waits. Second, and more important for a rancher: when the forecast band describes cattle that are not currently trading, the honest thing is to say so rather than to score ourselves against whatever did trade. That is exactly the correction in 2.4 and the rule written into 2.5.

1.2  Forward Curve — Where the Index Itself Is Headed

A forward curve of what, exactly: of the index. The table below is not a price forecast. It is the HCMI projected onto each of the next six months, using prices that have already been transacted for delivery in those months — deferred CME feeder and live cattle settlements, plus forward-delivery video sales of Montana-origin calves. It is put on the same 2024 = 100 scale as the headline number, so you can read it straight against this week’s 133.9 and see whether the market is pricing conditions better or worse than today.

Every one of the six months improved this week, each by about two points — about two percent. That is the first time the whole curve has moved up together since it started publishing, and it happened because deferred feeder cattle futures gained roughly $12 and forward video sales held.

What the curve is saying, in plain terms. Every month in it sits below today’s 133.9. That means buyers committing now for cattle delivered between October and March are paying as though conditions will be slightly softer than they are today — not a collapse, a modest step down, and two percent less of a step down than they were pricing a week ago. Where no forward-delivery lots existed for a month, the Montana leg is carried at the last cash print and the table says so.

1.3  The Week in One Place

The week ending September 12, 2026 was the week the cattle market turned around. After three straight weeks in which Honest Cattle lowered its Montana calf price forecast, nearly every number moved the other way. October feeder cattle futures gained $12.35 on the week to $332.50. October live cattle gained $6.72 to $219.67. December corn fell six and a half cents. Billings Livestock sold 2,020 head on Thursday and the calves brought about $10 per hundredweight more than the week before. Texas reported feeder cattle steady to $10 higher. The quality premium in the beef cutout widened again. And Montana’s drought footprint shrank for the first time in more than a month.

The barn numbers are the ones worth holding onto. At Billings Livestock on Thursday, 58 head of 567 to 594 pound steer calves brought $401.58 per hundredweight, and 12 head of 623 to 640 pound steers brought $379.19. A week earlier the comparable Montana prints were $392.32 and $368.34. Lighter calves did better still: 54 head in the 405 to 425 pound range brought $516.08. USDA’s own reporter described higher undertones on calves and steady to higher undertones on yearling heifers.

Honest Cattle is holding its calf price forecast this week rather than raising it. Three considerations argue for patience. One strong week does not reverse a six-week decline. The cull cow market fell for a third straight week. And this report’s own accuracy scorecard moved sharply against us — which turns out to be the most important thing in this edition, because part of that miss is a measurement problem of our own making. Section 2 explains it in full and logs it as a correction.

The one number that did not improve is the feedlot’s. Because feeder cattle rallied harder than fed cattle did, the board’s own feeding margin actually got slightly worse this week, from a loss of $34.46 a head to a loss of $39.51. A feeder rally that outruns the fed-cattle rally is a rally that makes the feedlot’s arithmetic harder, not easier — and the feedlot is who bids on your calf. That tension is the thing to watch over the next month.

Sentiment rises to 5.0 out of 10 from 4.5. The market earned the half point. It did not earn more than that while cows are still falling, the funds still hold a record corn position, and our own error metric is pointed the wrong way.

2. 2026 Montana Quarterly Forecast

Honest Cattle’s Montana quarterly weight band prices are HELD across all three near quarters this week, unchanged from the September 7 edition. They are published in two tight weight classes, 550–599 lb and 600–649 lb, steers and heifers priced separately, and the table runs through Q4 2027.

2.1  Montana Quarterly Weight Band Prices — and What They Assume

A forecast price is meaningless without the cattle it describes, so here is exactly what these numbers assume. Every assumption below moves the price, and several of them are inside a producer’s control.

• Weaned, minimum 45 days. Not fresh off the cow. This is the single biggest assumption in the list.
• Load lots — a uniform, full-truckload group, not singles and not a handful of head sorted out of a mixed consignment.
• Montana-origin, with health papers current.
• Steers and heifers priced separately, in the stated weight class, at the weight actually weighed — not a projected sale weight.
• FOB the auction: the price at the barn, buyer paying freight from there.
• Dollars per hundredweight, and a quarterly average — the expected level across the whole quarter, not a call on any single sale day. Individual sales inside the quarter will print above and below the band.
• Commodity cattle. No age-and-source, NHTC, all-natural or branded-program premium is built in. Verified programs sell over these numbers; this report treats that premium separately, in 2.4 and Section 18.

What those assumptions are worth, in dollars — derived this week, not carried forward. Recent editions put the gap between weaned load lots and unweaned barn-run calves at $60 to $80 per hundredweight. That number was repeated rather than re-checked. Honest Cattle re-derived it from Montana’s own prints this week and it is too high. Here is the arithmetic, with head counts, so you can judge it yourself.

That puts the real gap at roughly $40 to $50 per hundredweight — $240 to $300 a head on a 600-pound calf. Two honest caveats: the video prices are for fall delivery while the barn prices are spot, and the barn samples are thin. But the direction and the order of magnitude are solid, and they do not support $60 to $80.

How much of that is weaning by itself? Less than you would think, and this is worth knowing before you spend money on it. The one true like-for-like comparison Montana produced this week — same barn, same sale, same weight class — was 550–599 pound steers at $408 weaned against $396 unweaned, a $12 per hundredweight premium on 11 head weaned against 84 unweaned. Thin, so treat it as indicative. The implication is that weaning alone is worth something like $12, and the remaining $30 to $40 comes from everything else the load lot brings with it: uniformity, full-truckload quantity, forward contracting and the video channel. Weaning is the entry ticket to that market, not the whole prize. Section 14 makes the marketing case; this is the number behind it.

Q3 2026 (Jul–Sep): HELD at $460–$495/cwt steer (mid $477) and $435–$470/cwt heifer (mid $452) for 550–599 lb calves; $435–$465/cwt steer (mid $450) and $410–$440/cwt heifer (mid $425) for 600–649 lb calves.

Q4 2026 (Oct–Dec): HELD at $443–$478/cwt steer (mid $460) and $418–$453/cwt heifer (mid $435) for 550–599 lb calves; $413–$448/cwt steer (mid $430) and $388–$423/cwt heifer (mid $405) for 600–649 lb calves.

Q1 2027 (Jan–Mar): HELD at $445–$480/cwt steer (mid $462) and $420–$455/cwt heifer (mid $437) for 550–599 lb calves; $415–$450/cwt steer (mid $432) and $390–$425/cwt heifer (mid $407) for 600–649 lb calves.

Why hold rather than raise. The case for raising is real: feeder futures gained $12.35, Montana barn calves gained about $10, Texas was steady to $10 higher, every month of the forward curve improved, and LRP insurance floors rose $12. The case for holding is that all of that is one week, and it follows six weeks of decline and three consecutive price cuts. Chasing a single strong week back up is how a forecast loses the discipline that makes it worth reading. If the next video sale and the next two barn weeks confirm this level, the bands go up. One Thursday does not do it.

2.2  2027 Extension — Q2 through Q4 2027

The three quarters above are Honest Cattle’s own forecast. The three below are the market’s — deferred CME feeder-cattle settlements converted into Montana calf bands using the ratio our own published quarters imply. Settlements are Friday, September 11, 2026.

A mechanical note worth understanding. The deferred board rallied hard this week — April 2027 feeders went from $305.52 to $317.27, August 2027 from $305.27 to $316.67. Yet the 2027 rows in the table above barely moved. That is not an error. Because Honest Cattle held its near-quarter bands while the futures underneath them rose, the calf-to-futures ratios the extension is built on fell correspondingly — from 1.469 to 1.412 in Q3 2026, from 1.449 to 1.393 in Q4, from 1.507 to 1.448 in Q1 2027. Holding a forecast while the board rallies mathematically compresses the premium we are implying over the board. If we hold again next week and the board rallies again, that compression becomes an argument for raising, and that table is where it will show up first.

2.3  Bred Females and Cull Cows — Quarterly Prices

How these rows are built. There is no bred-cow board and no cull-cow board, so these are scaling rules anchored on real Montana prints. Bred heifers anchor on the $2,766.73 print across 50 head from the week ending August 29 — the last week Montana produced a bred print with real volume behind it, and this week’s report had essentially no bred trade at all (Section 15) — and scale by each quarter’s 550–599 lb steer band. The cull row anchors on this week’s $161.89 return-to-feed boner cow print across 117 head, week ending September 5. Running-age bred cows remain carried at $2,750 — Montana still has not produced a six-to-eight-year-old bred print with enough volume behind it to anchor a six-quarter table, and this section will say so every week until it does.

2.4  Forecast Accuracy and Calibration — Current Vintage

Honest Cattle grades its own past quarterly calls every week so a rancher knows how much weight to put on this week’s band. The scorecard was rebuilt yesterday, September 12, and it moved hard against us.

The sample grew from 5 paired weeks to 7, and both new pairs were large misses. For the week of September 8, the 550–599 band forecast $477 against a realized $387.88 — a miss of $89.12. The 600–649 band forecast $450 against a realized $368.34, a miss of $81.66. That pulled the overall numbers sharply:

Bias: −$26.45/cwt, against −$2.87 last week. Negative means realized prices came in below our forecast — we have been forecasting high. On a 575-pound calf that is about $152 a head. MPE −7.03 percent. MAD $38.83/cwt, nearly double last week’s $20.20 — that is the typical miss size, direction ignored, and it is the headline accuracy number. RMSE $50.39, well above MAD, which says a couple of very large misses are driving the average rather than consistent error. By band: 550–599 runs −$18.61 on 4 pairs, 600–649 runs −$36.89 on 3 pairs.

Calibration regression (actual = a + b × forecast): slope 2.432, intercept −$716.78, R² 0.529. The R² is the one number that improved, and sharply — from 0.001 to 0.529. Our forecast now explains about half the variation in the realized price, where a week ago it explained none. But a slope of 2.43 says the real market moves about two and a half times as far as our forecast does: we under-react. Sample is still 7 against a significance floor of 8, so treat all of it as indicative.

Corrections this week: yes, and this one is about the scorecard itself. Those two September misses are not a clean measure of how wrong the forecast was, and Honest Cattle is not going to let a number that flatters or damns itself go out unexamined. The realized figures of $387.88 and $368.34 are Montana auction weighted averages that in the first weeks of September consist almost entirely of unweaned calves sold in small lots and singles. The quarterly bands describe something different — weaned, uniform load lots, the cattle that move through the video sales and the fall special feeder sales. The September 7 edition said in print that the gap between those two populations was running $60 to $80 per hundredweight. The scorecard is scoring one against the other. As of this edition that gap is re-derived at roughly $40 to $50 (see 2.1), which makes the mismatch somewhat smaller than we had been saying but does not remove it.

What that means, stated both ways. Part of that $89 miss is a genuine miss: the market did fall further than we allowed for. Part of it is an apples-to-oranges comparison Honest Cattle built into its own grading system. Both are true and neither cancels the other. The band definition has therefore been made explicit as of this edition — weaned load-lot cattle — and the realized series the scorecard pairs against needs to be narrowed to match, or the band needs a second published line for barn-run cattle. That fix is owed and it will be built. Until it is, read the fall-run entries in this scorecard as overstating the error, and read the bias figure as directionally honest but not precisely measured.

What it means for this week’s band. Even discounting the mismatch, the signal points one way: we have been on the high side, and the 600–649 band has been the worse of the two. That is the single strongest argument against raising the bands into this week’s rally, and it is the reason the forecast is held rather than lifted.

n = paired observations. Bias = average signed miss (+ = we forecast low). MPE = the signed miss as a percent of price. MAD = average miss size ignoring direction. RMSE = a big-miss-sensitive version of MAD, in dollars per hundredweight. R² = the share of the real price swing our forecast explains, from 0 to 1.

2.5  Six-Month Look-Back — Grading the Forecast We Published, Not the One We Revised

New this week, and it is the most important change this report has made to how it grades itself. Honest Cattle forecasts twelve months out and revises those forecasts as the market moves. A scorecard that compares the latest revision against the realized price measures how fast we chase the market. It does not measure whether a rancher who read us in the spring could have relied on us in the fall — and that second question is the only one that matters if these bands are going to be worth planning around.

So from this edition forward, every published set of bands is frozen at publication and never rewritten — a vintage. Each week the report will grade the vintage published roughly six months before the forecast period, ignoring every revision in between, and print that score beside the current-vintage score in 2.4. Where the two disagree, this report will say which one a rancher should weight.

Here is why that matters, using our own Q3 2026 call. The table below is every band Honest Cattle published for 550–599 pound Montana steers in Q3 2026, in the order we published them. Nothing is re-stated; these are the numbers as they appeared.

The mid came down $41 per hundredweight in ten weeks — about $246 a head on a 575-pound calf — on a quarter that was already half over when the series starts. A rancher who read the July 6 edition and planned around $518 was working from a number this report walked away from four times. That is the cost of grading only the most recent revision: it never shows up. Now it will, every week.

What this report can and cannot score yet, stated plainly. Honest Cattle mined its own published archive this week — 41 editions back to January 5, 2026. The bands are recoverable in a consistent, machine-readable form only from July 6, 2026 forward: nine vintages, 108 band rows, now frozen in a ledger. Before that, editions quoted bands in prose and in dollars per pound on different weight conventions, and two editions carry a table this report cannot read.

So the honest position: a full six-month look-back cannot be published today. The oldest clean vintage is ten weeks old, not twenty-six. The complete six-month scorecard begins with the edition of January 4, 2027, six months after the first clean vintage. Until then this section publishes the revision path above, which is the same discipline over the window that actually exists. Honest Cattle would rather print a ten-week history that is true than a six-month table built by reconstruction.

Three rules now govern this, and they are permanent. First, a frozen vintage is never edited — not for a typo, not for units, not to improve a class definition; corrections are added and disclosed, never substituted. Second, a vintage is graded only against a realized series describing the same cattle it described, which is the correction logged in 2.4 — where no matching series exists, the pair is reported as unscoreable rather than graded against the nearest thing available. Third, cull cows and bred females get frozen and graded on the same terms as calves, starting with the bred and cull table in 2.3, which until now this report published and never graded.

3. CME Futures and Corn

Corn first, because corn leads — and this week corn finally helped. December corn settled at $5.30¼ per bushel on Friday, September 11, down three and a half cents on the day and down six and a half cents on the week from $5.36¾. That is the first weekly decline in corn since the run-up began in mid-August, and it arrived in the same week the cattle contracts rallied.

October live cattle settled at $219.67, up $1.85 on the day and up $6.72, or 3.2 percent, on the week from $212.95. October feeder cattle settled at $332.50, up $4.95 on the day and up $12.35, or 3.9 percent, on the week from $320.15. Feeders outran fed cattle by a wide margin — which matters, and Section 8 explains why it is not the unambiguous good news it looks like.

The feeder/corn ratio is 62.7 ($332.50 ÷ $5.3025), up 3.1 points from 59.6 a week ago and back into the middle of the ten-year band of roughly 55 to 65. Feeders rising while corn falls is the single most favourable combination this ratio can show, and it is the cleanest bullish number in the report.

SIDEBAR — FEEDER/CORN RATIO -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week:  62.7  (Oct feeders $332.50 / Dec corn $5.3025)
Prior week: 59.6  ·  change +3.1 points  (10-yr avg ~55-65)
Per 1.0-point move:  +/-$0.20-0.35/cwt  ·  +/-$1.20-2.10/head on a 600-lb calf
This week's move: +$0.62 to +$1.09/cwt  ·  +$4 to +$7/head
Direction: BULLISH - feeders up and corn down at the same time
Lag: 1-2 weeks

Reading that sidebar in plain English. The feeder/corn ratio is the price of a hundredweight of feeder cattle divided by the price of a bushel of corn. It answers one question: how expensive are cattle relative to the feed it takes to finish them? Ten years of history put the normal range at roughly 55 to 65. At 62.7 we are back in the comfortable part of that range after three weeks below it. Each full point of improvement has historically been worth about 20 to 35 cents per hundredweight on the Montana calf bid, showing up within a sale week or two.

Feed-cost pass-through check (MSU AMPC / Marsh method, re-estimated by Honest Cattle)

Each 10 percent move up in corn shaves about 2 percent off calf value with fed-cattle prices held constant. Each 10 percent move up in fed-cattle prices lifts calf value about 14 percent. That second number is where the calf market’s leverage lives: fed cattle move the calf far harder than corn does, which is exactly why this week’s $6.72 gain in live cattle matters more than the six-cent break in corn.

The current read is unchanged from last week because it runs on monthly USDA data that has not refreshed: corn near $4.28 per bushel on a monthly-average basis, down 4 percent year over year, and fed cattle up 11 percent year over year, together imply Montana feeder prices about 16.7 percent above a year ago. Montana 600–649 pound feeder steers are actually running 16.8 percent above — leaving essentially nothing as herd-cycle scarcity premium beyond what feed and fed-cattle prices already explain. Today’s calf price is bought and paid for by cheap-ish corn and strong fed cattle, not by an extra premium for a small herd.

Method borrowed from Montana State University’s Agricultural Marketing Policy Center (John Marsh); elasticities re-estimated by Honest Cattle on 2000-present USDA data (n = 319 monthly observations; levels R² = 0.961; out-of-sample backtest MAPE 7.4 percent). The actual comparison uses Montana AMS_1778 auction prices. Descriptive association, not a price forecast and not trading advice. Data as of the July 2026 monthly read; computed September 12, 2026.

4. Futures and Options Activity

1. Tape

October feeder cattle $332.50 (+$4.95 on the day, +$12.35 on the week); October live cattle $219.67 (+$1.85, +$6.72); December corn $5.30¼ (−3½¢, −6½¢). Everything below is what those three numbers do not tell you.

2. Flow Quality

Open interest as reported by the CFTC for Tuesday, September 8: corn 1,803,323 contracts, live cattle 294,350, feeder cattle 62,097. Corn’s open interest rose again, from 1,764,182 — more money coming into corn even as the price fell, which is not the usual pattern and is worth watching. Feeder cattle open interest fell again, from 64,359 to 62,097. A price rally on falling open interest is short covering rather than fresh buying, and short covering is a weaker foundation than new money. That is a caution worth setting against this week’s $12.35 feeder gain.

3. Ownership

From Honest Cattle’s automated paper-market feed, built on the CFTC’s disaggregated report — positions as of Tuesday, September 8, released Friday, September 11. Percentiles rank against 609 archived weekly reports.

Corn stays at a record, and it is now the longest-standing fact in this section. The funds — the managed-money speculators, who neither own nor feed cattle — are net long 414,459 corn contracts, up another 13,456 on the week, and still at the 100th percentile of 609 weekly reports. That is the largest fund position in corn in the entire history on file, and it has now held that record for two straight weeks while the corn price fell. A crowded long that stops working is the classic setup for a fast unwind, and a corn unwind would hand the calf market a gift.

Live cattle positioning did not move. The funds are net long 48,905 contracts, up just 54 on the week, at the 35.6th percentile — below the middle of eleven years of history. The packers and feedlots, who use futures as insurance on cattle they already own rather than as a bet, remain net short. That short is a price lock, not a wager that the market falls.

Feeder cattle: the funds got lighter into the rally. Net long 7,448 contracts, down 988 on the week, at the 66.6th percentile. Read that alongside the falling open interest above and the picture is consistent — this week’s feeder rally was not driven by speculative buying. It was driven by cheaper corn and by commercial demand.

The single most material ownership fact this week is that the feeder rally happened without the funds. A rally the speculators did not cause is a rally the speculators cannot easily take away, which makes it more durable than it looks — but it also means there is no fund buying left in reserve to push it further.

4. Curve

The board’s own gross feeding margin on Honest Cattle’s standard animal — 12.5 × October live cattle, minus 7.5 × October feeders, minus 55 bushels × December corn — works out to 12.5 × $219.67 − 7.5 × $332.50 − 0.55 × $530.25 = $2,745.88 − $2,493.75 − $291.64 = −$39.51 per head. Last week the same calculation produced −$34.46. The board’s feeding margin got worse this week, by $5.05 a head, in a week when everything rallied. That is because feeders gained 3.9 percent while fed cattle gained 3.2 percent — the input rose faster than the output. Read this figure as gross of non-feed costs: yardage, interest, death loss and labour still come out of it.

On basis: October live cattle at $219.67 now sits $0.61 above the last published 8-State Region live weighted average of $219.06, having been $6.30 below it a week ago. Futures crossing from below cash to above it in a single week is a genuine change in what the board expects, and it is one of the more encouraging signals in this edition.

8. Translation and Disclosure

Net read for a Montana calf seller: cheaper corn and a better feeder/corn ratio are worth roughly $0.62 to $1.09 per hundredweight, or $4 to $7 a head, on a 600-pound calf over the next one to four weeks. Set against that, the board’s feeding margin deteriorated and the rally came without fund participation. Call the near-term net modestly positive but fragile.

Honest Cattle holds no futures or options positions and recommends none. This section interprets public market data so a producer can understand what the paper market is saying; it is not trading advice.

The LRP Corner

Livestock Risk Protection is federal price insurance sold through crop-insurance agents. Economically it works like a put option — it sets a floor under a price with no margin calls — and the federal government subsidizes 35 to 55 percent of the premium depending on the coverage level chosen.

USDA’s Risk Management Agency rates are current as of the sales-effective date of Friday, September 11, 2026. For Montana feeder steers in weight class 2 — 600 to 900 pounds — with a December 11, 2026 end date (13 weeks), top coverage at 100 percent prices a floor of $324.21 per hundredweight at an after-subsidy producer premium of $9.31/cwt, or $55.84 on a 600-pound calf. At 95 percent coverage the floor is $308.00 for $4.46/cwt, or $26.78 a head. For a January 8, 2027 end date (17 weeks), the 100-percent floor is $321.31 at $10.17/cwt, or $61.00 a head.

The floors moved up $12 this week — the December 11 hundred-percent floor went from $312.15 to $324.21 — because LRP prices off the futures board and the board rallied. That is the practical consequence of this week for anyone considering coverage: the same insurance now protects a meaningfully higher price for roughly the same premium. Two cautions that never change. LRP settles on the CME Feeder Cattle Index at the end date, not on what your calves actually bring at your barn, so basis risk stays with you. And rates reset every business day off the futures close, so a quote is good for a day. Honest Cattle recommends neither buying nor skipping LRP; this is published public rate information, not advice.

The BRAND endorsement, checked again this week and still not purchasable. USDA’s Risk Management Agency is developing a Beef Retention and National Development endorsement under LRP that would let a producer insure the economic value of retaining a heifer for breeding over a two-year period. As of this writing it remains in development with no published rates and no sign-up window. Section 17 covers what it would do and what it would cost the taxpayer. Nothing about it can be bought this fall.

5. Cash Fed Cattle and Basis Context

USDA’s 5 Area Weekly Weighted Average Direct Slaughter Cattle report (AMS_2477 / LM_CT150) most recently published the week ending Sunday, September 6, 2026: 40,678 head confirmed in the 8-State Region (USDA groups them into five reporting areas — Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Iowa/Minnesota), down sharply from 51,429 the week before and from 63,095 a year ago. That is the main cattle-feeding country of the southern and central Plains and the Corn Belt. Montana is not in it — which is exactly why it matters to a Montana rancher: it is the fed-cattle price the feedlots buying your calves are selling into, not a local price. Steers on a live FOB basis averaged $219.06 per hundredweight across 15,623 head at an average weight of 1,574 pounds; dressed delivered steers averaged $345.11. The report covering the just-ended week posts Monday, September 14 — the morning this edition publishes — so the current week’s cash read is not yet in hand and is not guessed at here.

The confirmed volume is the number to notice. At 40,678 head, negotiated cash trade ran 21 percent below the prior week and 36 percent below the same week a year ago. Thin cash trade cuts both ways: it makes the reported average less reliable as a read on the whole market, and it usually means feedlots are holding rather than selling, which is behaviour consistent with the board rallying.

Basis. October live cattle at $219.67 now sits $0.61 above that 8-State Region live average of $219.06. A week ago the board was $6.30 below cash. Futures moving from a $6.30 discount to a small premium in one week means the board stopped expecting cheaper fed cattle — the single clearest expression of this week’s change in tone.

Translation to the Montana calf bid. A board that has crossed above cash, on a two-to-four-week lag, is worth roughly $0.20 to $0.40 per hundredweight to the Montana calf — call it $1 to $2 a head. Small in isolation. It matters because it is the fed-cattle end of the chain finally pointing the same direction as the feeder end, which has not been true since July.

6. Montana Weekly Auction Data

Billings Livestock Commission sold 2,020 head on Thursday, September 10 — the biggest Montana sale of the fall so far — and calves brought about $10 per hundredweight more than a week earlier. Steers of 567 to 594 pounds averaged $401.58 across 58 head; 623 to 640 pound steers averaged $379.19 across 12 head; and lighter calves did better still, with 405 to 425 pound steers at $516.08 across 54 head. On the heifer side, 580 to 599 pound heifers brought $347.81 and a 28-head lot at 596 pounds brought $350.00. USDA’s reporter described higher undertones on calves and steady to higher undertones on yearling heifers, and noted that calves continue to be marketed early because of dry conditions.

Public Auction Yards in Billings sold 576 head on Wednesday, September 9 — a thin sale with only 122 feeders, where calves and yearlings were both too lightly tested to establish a trend. Miles City has not posted a new sale since September 1. Statewide, USDA’s summary for the week ending September 5 (published September 8) counted 2,601 cattle, up from 1,783 the week before, with feeder composition at 40 percent steers, 54 percent heifers and 6 percent bulls — much closer to the 96-week Montana average of 49.3 / 47.6 / 2.8 than the badly heifer-skewed 17 / 77 / 6 reading of the prior week.

The full barn-by-barn roster lives on the website, and it is the better place for it. All twelve licensed markets are accounted for there every week — those that sold with head counts and class prices, those that did not hold a sale, and those whose results Honest Cattle cannot read automatically — along with lot-level detail and the downloadable edition dataset: honestcattle.net/montana-weekly-auction-results.

Translation to the Montana calf bid. This is the first week since July in which the barn confirmed the board rather than contradicting it. But note what these cattle are: unweaned calves in small lots, the same population Section 2.1 re-derives this week at roughly $40 to $50 per hundredweight under weaned load lots. A $401.58 print on 578-pound unweaned steers is consistent with a load-lot market in the $450s to $470s — which is where the held Q3 band sits.

7. Video Auction Results — Seasonal

No new video sale closed in the reporting week. The most recent remains Superior Livestock’s September 4 sale of 41,129 head, covered in full in the September 7 edition, where feeder steers traded $10 to $20 per hundredweight below the prior sale, and the prices being bid for later delivery carried a lower undertone. Nothing has re-tested that level since.

The Montana-only forward-delivery prices therefore stand unchanged: 600–649 pound Montana steer calves transacted at $433.17 for October delivery, $439.14 for November, $446.15 for December and $445.00 for January 2027, built lot by lot from sales through August 21 and filtered to lots with a published Montana shipping or delivery point.

Why that matters more than usual this week. The board rallied $12.35 and Montana barn calves gained about $10, but the forward video book — the market where Montana’s fall load lots actually change hands — has not been tested since September 4. Until it is, this week’s rally is confirmed by the barn and by the futures but not by the one market that prices the exact cattle the quarterly bands describe. That is the single largest reason the bands are held rather than raised, and the next sale is the most important scheduled event on this report’s calendar.

Standing cautions, unchanged: video figures pool all regions unless Honest Cattle’s Montana-only filter is applied, and video prices are forward prices for cattle shipping later on a base weight with a one-way slide, not a spot cash bid. Full house-by-house history and terms: honestcattle.net/montana-video-cattle-auction-trends.

8. Feedlot profitability using today’s Montana calf prices

Full break-even math on an actual USDA-reported Montana purchase price. The deepest real Montana yearling print this week comes from Billings Livestock on September 10: 9 head of 778-pound steers at $379.00 per hundredweight.

The math, step by step. Buying that steer costs 7.78 cwt × $379.00 = $2,948.62 a head. Feeding him from 778 pounds to a 1,400-pound finished weight is 622 pounds of gain. At December corn of $5.30¼ a bushel — $189.38 a ton — a commercial yard’s all-in cost of gain, including feed, yardage, interest, medicine and death loss, runs about $1.09 a pound, so 622 pounds of gain costs $677.98. Total invested: $3,626.60. Divide by 14.00 hundredweight of finished steer and the break-even is $259.04 per hundredweight live.

Now price the other end. That steer finishes roughly seven months out, which lines up with the April 2027 live cattle contract at $224.10. Break-even $259.04 against $224.10 is a loss of $34.94 per hundredweight, or $489.16 a head.

What that number means, and why it got worse in a good week. It does not mean feedlots are about to lose $489 a head. It means today’s Montana yearling price and today’s deferred fed-cattle board still cannot both be right. Last week the same calculation produced a $503 gap; this week it is $489 — barely improved, despite corn falling and fed cattle gaining $6.72, because the yearling got $8 more expensive at the same time. The board’s own feeding margin (Section 4) actually deteriorated $5.05 a head this week for exactly that reason. A feeder rally that outruns the fed-cattle rally makes the feedlot’s arithmetic harder, and the feedlot is who bids on your calf. That is the single most important caution in an otherwise encouraging week, and it is why the forecast is held rather than raised. The packer’s side of the chain is the next section; the two margins move on different clocks and should not be read as one number.

9. Boxed Beef Cutout and Packer Economics

USDA’s National Weekly Boxed Beef Cutout report (AMS_2461 / LM_XB459) for the week ending Friday, September 11, 2026 put the Choice cutout at a weekly average of $378.16 per hundredweight, up 68 cents, and the Select cutout at $353.23, down $2.59. The published Choice–Select spread is $24.93, against $21.67 the week before — a widening of $3.26 and the widest reading since the record run in late August. Total load count was 444, down from 577.

Choice up while Select falls is the most useful shape this report can take. Beef as a whole did not get more expensive this week — the beef that graded Choice did, and the beef that graded Select got cheaper. Buyers were paying for quality specifically, not for beef generally. That matters to a Montana cow-calf operation because grade is the part of this a rancher actually controls, through genetics and weaning. The primal detail says the same: the Choice rib primal averaged $645.59 against Select’s $522.56, a $123 gap on the single primal most sensitive to grade.

SIDEBAR — CHOICE-SELECT SPREAD -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week:  $24.93/cwt  (weekly avg, AMS_2461, wk ending 2026-09-11)
Prior week: $21.67/cwt  ·  change +$3.26
Per $1/cwt move:  $0.65-0.85/cwt on a 600-lb calf  ·  $4-5/head verified-program
This week's move: +$2.12 to +$2.77/cwt  ·  +$13 to +$16/head on verified calves
Direction: BULLISH - and the strongest single signal in this edition
Lag: 5-9 months

SIDEBAR — PACKER GROSS MARGIN -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week:  $33.05/cwt  (Choice cutout $378.16 - dressed fed cash $345.11)
Prior week: $32.99/cwt  ·  change +$0.06  (essentially flat)
Per $1/cwt expansion:  +$0.20-0.40/cwt  ·  +$1.20-2.40/head on a 600-lb calf
Direction: NEUTRAL - margin held wide rather than widening further
Lag: 2-4 weeks

Reading those two sidebars in plain English. The Choice–Select spread is the price gap between Choice-grade beef and Select-grade beef. It is the clearest market signal that quality gets paid, and it reaches a rancher through the packer’s grid. Every dollar that spread widens is worth about 65 to 85 cents per hundredweight on a verified-quality 600-pound Montana calf — roughly $4 to $5 a head — arriving five to nine months later when that calf reaches the rail. This week’s $3.26 widening is worth $13 to $16 a head.

PGM is packer gross margin — the gap between what a packer sells a carcass for and what it paid for the animal, put on the same carcass basis. It is gross: labour, plant costs and everything else still come out of it. On an 887-pound carcass a $33.05 margin is about $293 a head of gross spread, essentially unchanged on the week. A packer holding a $293-a-head margin is a packer that keeps bidding, and after a summer of margin swings, stability at a wide level is itself good news for the calf market.

How the Packing Business Is Actually Doing

Gross margin is not profit, and this is the part a calf-price-only reading of the market misses entirely. Honest Cattle converts most numbers in this report into what they mean for a Montana calf, but the packing sector’s own condition is worth stating on its own terms, because it is the single biggest structural fact in the beef chain right now — and it is not a good one.

Packers are losing money. Industry estimates through 2026 put per-head losses in a range of roughly $50 to $300, with figures near $250 a head widely reported this year. Tyson has told investors it expects a beef-segment operating loss of up to $650 million for fiscal 2026, raised from a prior estimate near $500 million. A wide gross margin on a given week does not contradict that: once labour, energy, plant overhead and interest come out, a $293-a-head gross spread can still be a net loss.

The cause is cattle supply, not consumer demand. Americans have not stopped buying beef — Section 9’s retail numbers show the opposite. Packers are losing money because plants built for a much larger national herd cannot be filled. Industry utilization has been running near 81 percent, and recent closures have taken roughly 10,000 daily shackle spaces out of the system: Tyson’s Lexington, Nebraska plant, JBS’s 2,000-head-a-day Souderton, Pennsylvania plant in June, Tyson’s Joslin, Illinois harvest plant and its Eagle Mountain, Utah case-ready plant. On the other side of the ledger, Cargill’s Fort Morgan, Colorado plant is back: workers ratified a five-year contract on August 17, ending a lockout that began May 20, and the plant returned to full operations in phases from September 3. Tyson’s Pasco, Washington plant remains for sale with no buyer reported.

What that means for a rancher, stated both ways. In the near term, a packing sector losing money is a packing sector with every incentive to bid less for cattle — and Section 10 explains why it has to keep bidding anyway. Over the longer term, a shrinking number of plants in fewer hands is worse for cash-market competition, whatever this week’s margin arithmetic looks like. That is the part that outlasts the current cycle, and it is the reason this report tracks plant closures as closely as it tracks prices.

Grass-Fed Beef

USDA’s National Retail Report — Beef (AMS_3228) shows the grass-fed premium widening sharply. Antibiotic-free grass-fed 80–89 percent ground beef in 1–2 pound packages advertised at $8.11 per pound across 1,069 stores, against $6.05 for the conventional equivalent in 3,411 stores — a premium of $2.06 a pound, or 34.0 percent. A week ago that premium was $1.12, or 17.9 percent. Year over year the grass-fed line is up from $7.69 while conventional is up only from $6.02. Of course rancher production costs are different given the time grass-fed cattle have to be retained — that retail premium is not margin, and a fair comparison has to set it against the extra months of grass, water, labour and risk the animal carries before it finishes.

One honest caveat on the steak line. Grass-fed boneless ribeye advertised at $13.72 this week against conventional at $23.79 — an apparent grass-fed discount that is almost certainly a feature-mix artifact rather than a market fact. These are advertised feature prices, and which chains promote which items swings the average hard from week to week on the thinner store counts. The ground-beef line, with three to four times the store coverage, is the more reliable read, and it says the grass-fed premium widened. Honest Cattle’s own dedicated grass-fed tracker produced no new reading this week.

Grocery-Store Action

The same report is a direct read on consumer demand and it strengthened again. The national Activity Index rose 4.7 percent to 114,128 from 108,962, and stands well above the 106,841 of a year ago. The Feature Rate eased two-tenths of a point to 89.0 percent across 25,521 outlets, against 87.7 percent a year ago. Chuck items led the increase, with boneless chuck roasts the largest single contributor — a seasonal turn from grilling cuts toward pot-roast cuts that shows up every September.

That matters for the calf bid. Retailers featuring more beef, more often, into a market where the cutout is already above $378 is a demand signal rather than a discounting signal — and it is the demand side that has to hold up if the cutout is going to support the packer bid that supports the feedlot bid that sets your calf price.

10. Cattle Slaughter and Packer Margins

Federally inspected cattle slaughter for the week ending Saturday, September 12, 2026 was 505,000 head, down 4.0 percent from 526,000 the week before and down 11.9 percent from 573,000 a year ago. Beef production was 448.0 million pounds, down 3.8 percent on the week and down 10.8 percent on the year. Year to date, beef production stands at 16,945.4 million pounds against 17,869.2 million a year ago — down 5.2 percent.

Unlike last week, this year-over-year decline is real rather than a calendar artifact. The week ending September 12 contained no holiday in either year. An 11.9 percent year-over-year drop in the kill is a large, clean number, and it is the supply-side reason the board rallied.

The August 21 Cattle on Feed report remains the governing forward fact: cattle and calves on feed at 11.1 million head on August 1, up 2 percent year over year, but July placements of 1.42 million head, down 11 percent and the lowest July placement number since the series began in 1996. More cattle on feed today, historically few fresh ones behind them. The next Cattle on Feed report lands later this month and is the most consequential scheduled data release between now and the end of the quarter.

SIDEBAR — SLAUGHTER + PLACEMENTS -> MONTANA CALF BID
Slaughter this week: 505,000 head (wk ending 2026-09-12)
   -4.0% week over week  ·  -11.9% year over year  - CLEAN, no holiday distortion
Year-to-date beef production: -5.2% YoY
Latest monthly placements: 1.42 million head, July 2026, -11% YoY (record low July)
Per 1% slaughter decline:  +$0.50-1.00/cwt  ·  +$3-6/head   (4-8 wk lag)
Per 1% placement decline:  +$0.50-1.50/cwt  ·  +$3-9/head   (5-9 mo lag)
Direction near-term: BULLISH - an 11.9% YoY decline is well outside ordinary
Direction forward:   STRONGLY BULLISH on the record-low placement number
Note: the codified per-1% rates are calibrated on ordinary swings. Do not
multiply an 11.9% decline out to a precise dollar figure - read it as a large
directional tailwind.

Reading that sidebar in plain English. Fewer cattle killed means fewer boxes of beef, which means packers competing harder for the cattle that exist — which supports cash fed cattle and, four to eight weeks later, the calf bid. Placements are the cattle going into feedlots this month; they become the kill five to nine months from now, which is why a record-low July placement number is a tailwind for calves sold this fall and finished next spring.

Packing capacity. Tyson’s Pasco, Washington plant — roughly 2,000 head a day, the Pacific Northwest’s principal fed-cattle and cull-cow outlet and a standing destination for Montana cattle — remains for sale with no buyer reported. Tyson’s Joslin, Illinois harvest plant and Eagle Mountain, Utah case-ready plant are closing; JBS ended slaughter at its 2,000-head-a-day Souderton, Pennsylvania plant in June; Cargill’s Fort Morgan, Colorado plant returned to full operations in phases from September 3, after workers ratified a five-year contract on August 17 that ended the lockout begun May 20. Section 9 puts numbers on what that adds up to for packer profitability. A failed Pasco sale would widen Pacific Northwest basis and push Montana freight east toward Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado, costing real dollars per hundredweight on fed sales and removing a bidder on cull cows. Fewer plants in fewer hands is structurally worse for cash-market competition regardless of how the near-term margin arithmetic looks.

11. Texas Auction Data and Secondary Market

USDA’s Texas Weekly Cattle Auction Summary (AMS_1955), published Friday, September 11 and covering September 6 through 12, reported 2,502 head statewide against 4,782 the prior reported week and 7,202 a year ago. Receipts were light following the Labor Day holiday, and USDA notes one sale went uncovered because a reporter was absent — so read the volume as a reporting artifact rather than a collapse in marketings.

The trade: feeder steers and heifers sold steady to instances $10.00 higher as, in USDA’s words, markets regained some lost footing through the week. That is a direct reversal of the prior week’s $3 to $15 lower and it matches what Montana’s barns did on Thursday. Composition ran 46 percent steers, 45 percent heifers and 9 percent bulls, with only 35 percent of the feeder supply over 600 pounds. Replacement cattle were 17 percent stock cows, 55 percent bred cows, 3 percent bred heifers, 14 percent cow-calf pairs and 11 percent bulls on 165 head.

Cull cows. Texas Boner 80–85 percent cows averaged $133.85 on average dressing across 37 head, with high-dressing cows at $144.30. Montana’s comparable average-dressing boner print was $143.67 — a Montana premium of about $9.82 per hundredweight, roughly $133 a head on a 1,350-pound cow.

Market coverage, disclosed. AMS_1955 aggregates the reporting Texas markets including Navasota Livestock Auction, Honest Cattle’s primary Texas proxy. Brazos Valley Livestock Commission at Bryan — the secondary market and the better read on open cows — publishes its own results, which are not included in the USDA aggregate above and were not separately reported here this week. No Missouri data appears in this section.

Translation to the Montana calf bid. Texas runs four to six weeks ahead of Montana in the fall run, so a Texas turn is an early read on whether Montana’s turn holds. Both states firming in the same week, on independent auction systems, is stronger evidence than either one alone — and it is the main reason this week’s Montana rally reads as a genuine change in tone rather than a one-barn anomaly.

12. Regional Weather Summary

Montana got rain, and the map moved. The featured mover this week is the state as a whole rather than any single county: the U.S. Drought Monitor’s September 8 release pulled Montana’s abnormally-dry-or-worse footprint from 92.52 percent of the state down to 79.95 percent, a 12.6-point improvement in one week and the first material easing since mid-summer. Moderate drought or worse fell from 56.71 percent to 52.98 percent.

The improvement was not uniform, and the detail matters more than the headline. While the broad dry footprint shrank, the harder categories crept the wrong way: severe drought or worse went from 17.49 to 18.14 percent of the state and extreme drought from 4.40 to 5.01 percent. Rain fell where conditions were marginal and largely missed the core of the dry area. A rancher in the worst-affected country did not get the relief the statewide number implies.

Southeast Texas remains hot and dry enough that USDA’s own auction reporters are citing pasture conditions as the reason calves keep coming to town early — the same dynamic that has run all summer and that shows up in Section 11’s volumes.

Both readings above are statewide and regional. For your own county’s seven-day forecast, SNOTEL, soil moisture, Drought Monitor detail and range condition, use your county page on honestcattle.net.

Translation to the Montana calf bid. Weather reaches the calf bid through two channels: how much grass is left, and how many calves get pushed to town early. This week’s rain buys time for operations on the margin, which slows forced marketing and takes some supply pressure off the fall run. But Billings Livestock still reported calves being marketed early because of dry conditions, so the relief has not yet reached the country that needed it most. Net: modestly supportive of the calf bid over the next four to six weeks, and worth perhaps $1 to $3 per hundredweight if the pattern holds into October.

13. Moisture, Snowpack, Range — See County Page

Montana’s Drought Severity and Coverage Index fell to 156 in the September 8 U.S. Drought Monitor release, from 171 on September 1 and 170 on August 25. A 15-point drop in one week is the largest single-week improvement this index has shown since spring, and it breaks a pattern of flat-to-worsening readings that had run since July.

The area detail, stated in full because the headline flatters it: abnormally dry or worse 79.95 percent of the state (from 92.52), moderate drought or worse 52.98 percent (from 56.71), severe drought or worse 18.14 percent (from 17.49), extreme drought 5.01 percent (from 4.40), exceptional drought none. The broad footprint improved substantially; the severe core got slightly worse.

Montana SNOTEL, county-level Drought Monitor readings, soil moisture and range condition are not republished here — they live on the auto-updating county pages at honestcattle.net, including the ten-year Park County snowpack history at honestcattle.net/ten-year-history-of-snowpack-in-park-county-montana. Mid-September is the bottom of the snowpack year; the number that decides next summer’s grass starts building in November.

14. Range Forage Outlook and Feeder Marketing Implications

The range signal improved this week for the first time since July, but unevenly — broad relief, no relief in the severe core. Combined with a rallying board and a barn that finally confirmed it, that produces five specific marketing decisions, priced.

1. If the rain reached you, stop and re-run the numbers before you ship. A market that gained $12.35 on the board and about $10 at the barn in one week, with drought easing, is a market where an extra two or three weeks of grass may now be worth more than the certainty of selling today. That was not true a week ago. On a 600-pound calf, the week’s move was worth roughly $60 a head.
2. If the rain missed you, nothing has changed — ship on schedule. Severe and extreme drought both expanded this week. Billings Livestock explicitly reported calves coming early because of dry conditions. Waiting on grass you do not have is the most expensive form of optimism available.
3. Wean anyway. This week’s barn prints were unweaned calves at $401.58 for 578 pounds. The weaned load-lot market those same cattle would sell into runs about $40 to $50 per hundredweight higher — $240 to $300 a head on a 600-pound calf (derivation in 2.1). Forty-five days of weaning remains the highest-return work available on most Montana outfits this fall, and the rally did not change that arithmetic.
4. Re-price LRP this week — the floors just moved up $12. A December 11 end date at 95 percent coverage now puts a $308.00 floor under a 600–900 pound feeder for $4.46 per hundredweight after subsidy, or $26.78 on a 600-pound calf (Section 4). The same insurance protects a meaningfully higher price than it did a week ago for roughly the same premium.
5. Cull cows: the bleeding slowed but has not stopped. Montana slaughter cows fell another $3 to $4 on boning and lean and $10 on breaking cows — a third straight weekly decline, though smaller than the $8 to $10 of the week before. The return-to-feed premium held at about $18 per hundredweight (Section 15). If you have cows with flesh to add, that competing bid is still there; if you are selling straight slaughter cows, you have now watched three weeks of decline and the import quota is still open.

15. Bred Cattle and Cull Cow Data

Montana’s replacement trade reversed completely, and the bred market essentially went dark. AMS_1778 for the week ending September 5 reported 142 head of replacement cattle: 87 percent stock cows, 6 percent bred cows, 4 percent cow-calf pairs and 3 percent heifer pairs. A week earlier the split was 11 percent stock cows and 83 percent bred females. The only bred print in the entire report was seven broken-mouth cows over eight years old at $2,300 a head.

Do not read that as retention collapsing. USDA’s own narrative explains it: “A few exposed cows sold this week — they are in the report below as stock cows. They sold with very little premium to feeding cows.” In other words, what moved through the ring was open and aged females being culled, not bred females being traded. The bred market was not tested. Last week’s 83 percent bred reading and this week’s 6 percent are both small samples pointing at different populations, and neither should be treated as a trend. This is exactly why the Section 2 bands do not move on a single replacement-composition reading.

Montana stock cow prices. Open cows under two years brought $246.90 per hundredweight across 29 head; two-to-four-year-olds $211.50 across 21 head; cows over five $169.28 across 27 head. Fleshy cows discounted hard — a fleshy under-two lot brought $182.06.

Montana cull cows, all three USDA grades, week ending September 5. On average dressing: Breaker 75–80 percent $144.20 across 14 head; Boner 80–85 percent $143.67 across 16 head; Lean 85–90 percent $141.28 across 6 head. The deep prints remain in the return-to-feed category: Breaker $157.11 across 28 head, Boner $161.89 across 117 head, Lean $158.63 across 28 head. Week over week the Boner return-to-feed print eased from $165.81 to $161.89, down $3.92, consistent with USDA’s reported $3 to $4 lower on boning and lean cows.

The cushion is still there, and it is the number to watch. Return-to-feed boner cows at $161.89 against average-dressing slaughter cows at $143.67 is a premium of $18.22 per hundredweight — about $246 a head on a 1,350-pound cow — essentially unchanged from last week’s $18.39. A cow with flesh left to add still has a competing bid that a straight slaughter cow does not. But USDA also reported that feeding cow demand has softened as feed prices rose, and noted an unusual inversion: on a dressed basis, fat cow prices are currently below boning and lean cows. Both are early signs that the feeding-cow bid is under pressure.

16. New World Screwworm Status

The U.S. outbreak is shrinking, and the monthly numbers are the clearest way to see it. APHIS’s confirmed-detections dashboard, as of Saturday, September 12, 2026, records 49 total animal cases since the first U.S. detection on June 3, 2026 — all 49 in domestic animals, none in wildlife. Of those, 47 are inactive and 2 remain active. The last reported animal detection was September 9.

Thirty cases in June, fourteen in July, four in August, one so far in September. That is the shape of a contained introduction, not a spreading one, and it is the most encouraging screwworm number this report has carried.

Two figures matter more than the case count, and both are zero. There have been no wildlife or feral cases and no wild flies caught in any trap — not one, in any month. APHIS notes that a trap detection means at least one wild fly was found. Zero across the whole outbreak is the single best evidence that screwworm has not established a breeding population in U.S. wildlife. Every one of the 49 cases has been an individual animal, found and treated.

The two active cases are not cattle. They are a horse confirmed September 9 in Presidio County, Texas, and a dog confirmed August 31 in Crockett County, Texas. The most recent confirmed cattle case in the dashboard’s detail table is July 30, in Brewster County. Detections remain confined to two states — Texas and New Mexico — concentrated in the west and southwest Texas border country.

Check it yourself; it updates six days a week. The dashboard is at aphis.usda.gov/…/stop-screwworm/current-status/confirmed and APHIS refreshes it Monday through Saturday at 6 p.m. Eastern. It carries the full case table — confirmed date, state, county, animal type, species and active/inactive status — plus a county map. If screwworm matters to your operation, that page is authoritative and more current than any weekly summary, including this one.

The international picture, which is the reason the border rules exist. Central American countries and Mexico have reported more than 209,400 screwworm cases in animals and more than 2,500 in people. That is the pressure the U.S. programs are built to hold back, and it has not gone away because the U.S. count is falling.

The border. USDA reopened the Douglas, Arizona port to Mexican cattle imports on August 24, 2026, the first in a planned phased reopening of southern ports, each step contingent on progress against the joint Action Plan’s milestones. No further port reopening was confirmed this week.

Translation to the Montana calf bid, and it cuts both ways. A contained and shrinking U.S. outbreak — zero wildlife cases, zero wild flies, one case in September — strengthens the case for continuing the phased port reopening, and reopened ports mean Mexican feeder cattle competing for southern feedlot pen space that would otherwise bid on northern cattle. That is mildly bearish for Montana feeder values over a six-to-eighteen-month horizon; Douglas began at roughly 700 head a day, so the near-term effect is under $1 per hundredweight. The other side is worth more than the arithmetic: the tail risk that mattered to a Montana rancher was never the current caseload, it was an establishment event in U.S. wildlife that would disrupt cattle movement nationwide. Four months of zero wildlife cases and zero trapped wild flies is real evidence against that, and it is the most bullish thing in this section. The risk that would reverse both readings is a jump in the Texas count, which the link above will show before this report can.

17. Import, Tariff and Policy Landscape

The imported lean beef market started quoting again this week, and the level is still down. The August 26, 2026 proclamation Further Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer created an additional 300,000 metric tons of duty-free import quota for lean beef trimmings, in three monthly tranches of 100,000 tonnes: the first ran September 1–30, the second October 1–30, the third October 31 until filled or November 30. Importers are directed to sell at a 25 percent discount to the prevailing import price. Free trade agreement partners and countries already holding country-specific beef quotas are unaffected.

This week’s print. USDA’s Import Beef Trade report for Friday, September 11 quotes Australia/New Zealand 90 percent lean cow meat at $339.00 to $342.00 per hundredweight East Coast for 0-to-15-day delivery. That quote did not exist a week ago — the Australian and New Zealand lean trade was at a standstill with no 90 percent lean price published at all. South American 90 percent lean came in at $305.00 to $320.00 East Coast, against $315.00 to $329.00 the prior week. USDA described the market as moderately to sharply lower on a light test.

So the honest read has two halves. The Australian and New Zealand market resumed quoting, and a price that exists is better for a seller than a standstill. But it resumed roughly $23 per hundredweight below where it sat in mid-July, and the South American line that kept trading through the standstill fell another $9 to $10 at the midpoint. The direction is still down; what changed is that sellers came back to the table. Montana’s cull cows fell $3 to $4 on boning and lean this week (Section 15) — a third straight weekly decline, but the smallest of the three.

Why this matters to a Montana operation. Imported 90 percent lean trim is the closest published floor there is under a cull cow, because a cull cow is mostly 90 percent lean trim once it is broken down. It does not touch the calf market, which is priced off the fed-cattle board and the Choice cutout. It touches every open cow you sell this fall.

The September 4 Executive Orders, and What Ranchers First Has Actually Implemented

Correction: the September 7 edition did not cover the two beef Executive Orders signed September 4 or USDA’s Ranchers First announcement of August 31, all of which fell inside the week that edition covered. That was an omission and it is corrected here. It is covered at the length the substance justifies, which is not much.

The labeling order directs a 90-day review. It does not make country-of-origin labeling law. In USDA’s words it “directs the Department of Agriculture, in consultation with the United States Trade Representative, to review its authorities related to mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef products through new regulations and legislative recommendations.” The review lands around December 3, after which the Secretary may propose rules or recommend legislation, or may do neither. Putting mandatory labeling back in force takes an act of Congress or a completed rulemaking, and the last time it was in force the United States lost a World Trade Organization case and Congress repealed it in 2015 — which is why USTR is in the room. Whether existing authority is enough is genuinely contested among people who read statutes for a living, and this report does not pick a side. What is not contested: nothing on a beef label changes today.

The competition order directs enforcement of a law already on the books — prioritized investigations under the Packers and Stockyards Act, more staff and resources, continued Justice Department coordination under the September 26, 2025 memorandum, and a report to the President on enforcement actions and a one-year plan. Read it against the record: enforcement promises on packer concentration have been made by administrations of both parties for two decades with little measurable change in the cash market. The report to the President is where this one either becomes real or does not.

What Ranchers First has actually implemented: of the new items, nothing. USDA’s page lists 44 actions in a mix of tenses. Sorted by the verb USDA itself used, everything announced August 31 and September 4 is still forward-looking — BRAND (“is developing”), a SPUR guaranteed loan program (“is creating”), a Regional Processor Continuity Effort (“is establishing”), Emergency Conservation Program access on Grasslands CRP acres (FSA guidance promised “early fall”), a million new Grasslands CRP acres, doubled Remote Grading participation, and federal beef purchasing preferences. The items written in past tense are real but predate the announcement and come mostly from the 2025 Beef Plan: $500 million to small and mid-sized processors through SPUR, the Remote Grading pilot expansion, Instrument-Enhanced Grading now running on about 20 percent of the fed kill or 20,000 head a day, the beginning-farmer definition extended from five years to ten, a lower Livestock Forage Program threshold, and predation-loss payments raised to 100 percent of market value. The grading items are the ones that actually touch a Montana carcass.

BRAND: What It Is, What It Would Cost, and When It Could Matter

BRAND is being reported as “insurance that pays ranchers to keep heifers.” It is not. Per USDA, the Beef Retention and National Development endorsement under Livestock Risk Protection will let a rancher “insure the economic value of retaining a heifer for breeding over an extended period of time.” The mechanics, per trade reporting: the policy fixes a protected value from the heifer’s expected slaughter value at enrollment, and pays the difference if her projected or realized slaughter value later exceeds the economic value of keeping her. Reporting puts the term at two years; USDA’s own page says only “an extended period of time.” In plain English it is insurance against having been wrong to keep her — it covers the opportunity cost, not the calf price. That is the right barrier to aim at: at today’s Montana prices, retaining a heifer means declining roughly $2,400 a head in cash, and nobody wants to decline that and then watch the market fall.

What it would cost, with the assumptions stated. RMA has published no rate, no subsidy schedule, no coverage table and no sales-closing date, so every figure here is an Honest Cattle estimate. Anchors: 4.71 million national beef replacement heifers (NASS, January 1, 2026) and an average LRP feeder insured value of $2,440 (RMA statistics through August 24). Assume a $2,400 insured value, a two-year premium of 6 to 14 percent, and the current LRP subsidy range of 35 to 55 percent.

At the mid case a $240 premium per head splits roughly $132 producer, $108 taxpayer, and the national cost is about a 56 percent increase on the roughly $225 million a year the existing LRP-Feeder program already costs in premium subsidy. Montana’s ~240,000 replacement heifers are derived from the state’s share of the national beef-cow herd rather than taken from a state table.

Where the money comes from, and why that matters. Not a new appropriation. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation is funded by a mandatory appropriation of “such sums as necessary,” and the old cap on livestock premium subsidies was removed by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. So RMA needs no new legislation and no annual vote — which also means nobody votes on the cost. A program whose indemnities are largest exactly when cattle prices fall is a program that gets most expensive in the same year the herd rebuild is working.

The timing, which is the real answer to whether this matters. USDA says RMA is fast-tracking BRAND to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation Board “for review this fall” and expects it “to be available to all ranchers in early 2027.” That is faster than RMA products normally move, and this report will hold USDA to it. But even taking it at face value: a two-year endorsement first sold in early 2027 does not complete until early 2029. BRAND cannot affect the current cattle cycle. That is not a political objection; it is arithmetic, and the same test applied to the import quota gave the opposite answer — the quota repriced the cull-cow market inside a week.

What to do about it now: nothing. Do not change a 2026 retention decision on an endorsement with no published rate. Watch for the FCIC Board docket this fall — that is the first moment BRAND becomes a document with real numbers in it, and this forecast will report it the week it happens.

Net policy read for the Montana calf bid: essentially zero this week. The labeling order is a study. The Packers and Stockyards order is an enforcement direction. BRAND is unpriced and years out. The only policy item with a live price effect remains the import quota, and it reaches cull cows rather than calves. None of this is why the market rallied — Section 3’s futures and Section 10’s slaughter numbers are why.

18. Packer Grid Pricing and Implications for Calf Prices

A typical packer grid pays a premium for Prime and for Certified Angus Beef (CAB), takes Choice as the base, and discounts Select. It then adjusts for yield grade — YG 1 through 5, a measure of how much saleable meat comes off the carcass, where YG 1 is leanest and best-paying and YG 4 and 5 are discounted — and discounts carcasses too heavy or too light for the plant’s specifications. Everything a Montana rancher does at breeding and weaning shows up in that grid five to nine months after the calf leaves.

The worked example, with this week’s numbers. The Choice–Select spread averaged $24.93 per hundredweight for the week ending September 11. On a 900-pound carcass that is 24.93 × 9 = $224.37 a head of grid premium captured by grading Choice instead of Select. About 70 percent of that flows back to the feedlot in grid earnings — call it $157.06 per fed steer. Spread across the 750-pound placement steer that produced the carcass, it is worth about $2.09 per hundredweight of break-even tolerance. By Honest Cattle’s codified translation it is the change in the spread that moves the calf bid: this week’s $3.26 widening is worth $2.12 to $2.77 per hundredweight, or $13 to $16 a head, on a verified-quality 600-pound Montana calf, arriving with a five-to-nine-month lag. Commodity calves with nothing verified behind them capture roughly 30 percent of that.

12-Month Choice/Select Trend

A note on how that table is sourced. Rows marked weekly avg come from USDA’s weekly boxed beef report for a week inside that month; rows marked daily close come from a single day’s print. The two are not the same measurement and should not be differenced against each other — mixing them is what made the spread look like it had fallen further than it had in earlier editions. Rows marked carried are Honest Cattle’s standing reference series from prior editions, shown so the trend reads properly rather than as fresh reporting. As of the September 10 rebuild, the 2026 rows are recovered from Honest Cattle’s own published archive with each row’s measurement basis tagged.

Two rows in that table need flagging rather than explaining. The April and May 2026 spreads of $1.59 and $3.80 are almost certainly not real Choice–Select spreads. A spread that narrow is close to unheard of in this market, and both rows are daily closes recovered from archived editions rather than weekly averages pulled from source. Honest Cattle’s working assumption is that those two rows captured a mismatched pair — most likely a Choice figure set against something other than the Select cutout. They are left in the table because removing a row quietly is worse than showing it and saying it looks wrong. They will be replaced when the underlying USDA reports for those weeks can be pulled directly, and no trend statement in this report rests on them.

What the trend does say, on the rows that are sound. The quality spread ran in the high teens through late 2025 and early 2026 — $17 to $22 — and it now sits at $24.93, roughly $6 to $7 above where the year started. June through September of this year runs $17.58, $13.78, $23.06 and $24.93, so the spread has been volatile inside a widening range. It widened again this week, and it widened the useful way, with Choice up and Select down. The durable message for a Montana cow-calf operation has not changed and has now held for a year: the market is paying more for cattle that grade. Genetics, weaning and verified programs are where that premium gets captured.

SIDEBAR — CHOICE-SELECT SPREAD -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week:  $24.93/cwt (weekly avg, AMS_2461, wk ending 2026-09-11)
Prior week: $21.67/cwt  ·  change +$3.26  ·  widest print since late August
Shape:      Choice +$0.68, Select -$2.59 - buyers paid up for beef that graded,
            and paid less for beef that did not
Per $1/cwt move:  $0.65-0.85/cwt on a 600-lb calf  ·  $4-5/head verified-program
Direction this week: BULLISH (+$3.26 widening = +$13 to +$16/head verified)
Lag:  5-9 months

Reading that sidebar in plain English. “Cwt” is hundredweight, one hundred pounds. The Choice–Select spread is the price gap between Choice-grade beef and Select-grade beef, and it is the market’s clearest statement that quality gets paid. It reaches a rancher through the packer’s grid, which pays the feedlot, which bids on your calf. Every dollar the spread widens is worth roughly 65 to 85 cents per hundredweight on a verified-quality 600-pound calf — about $4 to $5 a head — arriving five to nine months later. This week’s widening is worth $13 to $16 a head, and it is the strongest single forward signal in this edition.

19. Rancher Share of Retail Beef and Price Transmission Index (PTI)

USDA published August data this week, and the two-month slide stopped. The Economic Research Service updated its Meat Price Spreads data set on September 11 with August figures. Honest Cattle downloaded and parsed that file directly for this edition rather than deriving the number from any intermediate calculation.

The number. Of every dollar the meat case collected for Choice beef in August 2026, 51.1 cents made it back to the ranch gate — a net farm value of $5.232 per pound against a Choice beef retail value of $10.229 per pound. That is unchanged from July’s 51.1 percent, after declines of 0.6 points in June and 3.9 points in July. August is the most recent month ERS has published.

The Price Transmission Index. PTI is the current rancher share minus its five-year average. The five-year average, taken from ERS’s own annual series for 2021 through 2025 — 36.8, 40.5, 47.8, 50.2 and 53.5 percent — is 45.8 percent. August’s PTI is therefore +5.3 percentage points, which is GREEN on the recentered thresholds (Red below 43.8 percent, Yellow 43.8 to 45.8 percent, Green above 45.8 percent).

Direction, which matters as much as level. Month over month the share is flat. Year over year it is down 3.5 points from August 2025’s 54.6 percent. The series peaked at 55.6 percent in May and fell in June and July before levelling here. Flat is the good news in this section: two more months at July’s pace would have carried the share into the Yellow band, and it did not happen. The mechanism behind the earlier decline is the one this section always names — the packer’s margin widened through the summer (Section 9), which meant more of the retail dollar stopped at the plant instead of continuing to the ranch. This week the packer margin was essentially flat too, at $33.05 per hundredweight, which is consistent with a rancher share that stopped falling.

For reference, ERS’s August all-fresh beef retail value was $9.643 per pound and its 5-market steer price was $235.00 per hundredweight. Neither belongs in the farmers’-share calculation, and this section notes them only so the numbers are not confused: the all-fresh denominator is what produced the wrong 40.8 percent figure that the August 31 edition published and the September 7 edition reversed in print.

SIDEBAR — PTI -> MONTANA CALF BID
Rancher share, August 2026:  51.1%  (USDA ERS published farmers' share of the
   Choice beef retail dollar; net farm value $5.232/lb vs retail $10.229/lb)
Five-year average (2021-2025 ERS annual): 45.8%
PTI: +5.3pp  -  GREEN  (Red <43.8% · Yellow 43.8-45.8% · Green >45.8%)
Month over month: FLAT (July 51.1% -> August 51.1%) - the slide stopped
Year over year:   -3.5pp from August 2025's 54.6%
Per 1pp NEGATIVE PTI: -$0.50 to -$1.00/cwt · -$3 to -$6/head on a 600-lb calf
   -  no headwind applies while PTI is positive
This week's contribution: roughly +$2.00/cwt · +$12/head of support
Lag: 4-8 weeks
Next ERS update: mid-October 2026 (September data)

Reading that sidebar in plain English. The rancher share is the slice of every retail beef dollar that gets back to the ranch gate — USDA tracks it directly and publishes it. PTI, the Price Transmission Index, simply measures whether that slice is running above or below its own five-year normal. At plus 5.3 points it is above normal, a modest tailwind worth about $2.00 per hundredweight — $12 a head on a 600-pound calf — over the next four to eight weeks. The codified rule only bites when PTI goes negative, and we are 5.3 points from that line. Cross-reference the live tile at honestcattle.net/montana-cattle-markets-2.

20. Sentiment Score

Honest Cattle’s sentiment score rises to 5.0 out of 10, from 4.5. The score is a single judgment about the next 60 to 90 days for a Montana cow-calf operation selling calves. Ten is euphoric, one is distressed, five is neutral. It is not a forecast of a price; the bands in Section 2 are the forecast. It is a read on whether the balance of what we know is getting better or worse.

What earned the half point. Nearly everything moved the right way at once, which is rare. Feeder futures gained $12.35, live cattle $6.72, corn fell six and a half cents, the feeder/corn ratio went from 59.6 to 62.7, Billings Livestock traded about $10 higher, Texas was steady to $10 higher on an independent auction system, the Choice–Select spread widened $3.26, the grocery Activity Index rose 4.7 percent, slaughter ran 11.9 percent below a year ago with no holiday distortion behind it, every month of the forward curve improved, LRP floors rose about $12, and Montana’s drought footprint shrank 12.6 points. Any three of those would be a good week.

What kept it from being worth more than half a point. Four things, and they are not small.

• The feedlot’s arithmetic got worse, not better. Because feeders rallied harder than fats, the board’s feeding margin moved from a $34.46 loss per head to a $39.51 loss. The feedlot is who bids on your calf. A rally that makes the buyer’s math harder is a rally with a short fuse unless fed cattle catch up.
• Cull cows fell for a third straight week, and the import quota is still running.
• The funds still hold a record corn long — 414,459 contracts net, the 100th percentile of the series. That position has to come out eventually, and when it does, corn goes somewhere.
• This report’s own error metric is pointed the wrong way. Bias moved to −$26.45 per hundredweight on seven pairs. Part of that is a measurement mismatch Honest Cattle built into its own scorecard and is fixing (Section 2), but part of it is a real miss.

Where that leaves a rancher. A 5.0 is neutral, and neutral after a strongly positive week is a deliberate statement: the near-term tape improved and the structural picture did not get worse, but one week does not undo six. If Billings prints higher again next Thursday and the board’s feeding margin stops deteriorating, this score goes up and the bands in Section 2 go up with it.

21. Risks and Watch Items for the Week Ahead

1. Does Billings confirm? (Thursday, September 17.) This is the single most important item on the list. One higher week at one barn is an event; two consecutive higher weeks is a trend, and a trend is what would move the bands in Section 2. Watch the 550–650 pound weaned lots specifically, not the barn-run average.
2. The board’s feeding margin. Feeders outran fats this week and the implied feeding loss widened to $39.51 a head. If that gap keeps widening, the feeder rally runs out of buyer. Watch whether October live cattle closes the distance on October feeders.
3. Cattle on Feed, due later this month. The most consequential scheduled release between now and quarter-end. July placements were the lowest for that month since the series began in 1996. Another low placement number confirms the tight-supply story that is holding this market up; a bounce undercuts it.
4. The record corn long. Managed money is net long 414,459 corn contracts, the 100th percentile of 609 weeks of records, and it added 13,456 last week. Corn fell anyway this week, which is what makes the position notable rather than reassuring. A liquidation would drop corn and help the feeding margin; a squeeze higher would do the opposite, and feeders would feel it within days.
5. The import quota’s second tranche and the cull-cow market. Australian and New Zealand 90 percent lean resumed quoting this week, $23 below July. Montana cows have fallen three weeks running. Watch whether the return-to-feed premium — $18.22 per hundredweight this week, essentially unchanged — starts to erode, because USDA already reports feeding-cow demand softening as feed costs rise.
6. Pasco. Tyson’s 2,000-head-a-day Pasco, Washington plant is still for sale with no buyer reported. A failed sale widens Pacific Northwest basis, pushes Montana freight east, and removes a bidder on cull cows. This is a slow-moving structural risk, not a weekly one, but it is the largest single one on Montana’s horizon.
7. Drought in the severe core. The statewide footprint improved sharply, but severe and extreme drought both expanded. If the next two Drought Monitor releases show the core continuing to deepen while the margins improve, the early-marketing pressure in Section 14 does not go away regardless of the headline number.
8. The FCIC Board docket this fall. USDA says RMA is fast-tracking the BRAND heifer-retention endorsement to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation Board for review this fall, with availability expected early 2027. That docket is the first moment BRAND becomes a document with actual rates in it. Nothing about it changes a 2026 marketing decision, but it is the single policy item on this list with a real date attached.
9. Screwworm port schedule. Douglas, Arizona reopened August 24 on a milestone-gated schedule. A further port reopening is mildly bearish for northern feeder values; a case-count jump in Texas pauses or reverses the schedule. Neither moved this week.

22. Hay Prices

USDA’s Montana Hay Report (AMS_2769) publishes on a weekly-to-biweekly cadence and no new report has been issued since September 4, 2026. The most recent print is carried forward here with its date stated rather than presented as fresh: Montana alfalfa large squares, good quality, $170 to $200 per ton FOB; premium supreme dairy-quality alfalfa $210 to $230; grass hay $150 to $180. Trade was reported as moderate with good demand.

The feed-cost picture nonetheless improved this week, and it improved on the grain side. December corn settled at $5.30¼, down six and a half cents on the week, and the feeder/corn ratio moved to 62.7 from 59.6 (Section 3). Cheaper corn is what lets a feedlot bid more for a calf, which is why that ratio matters more to a cow-calf operation than the corn price by itself.

One countervailing note from USDA’s Montana livestock summary: feeding-cow demand has softened as feed prices rose. That is a comment on hay and roughage cost rather than corn, and it is the mechanism behind the pressure on the return-to-feed cow bid described in Section 15. Corn got cheaper; hay did not.

What wintering costs at these prices. A dry pregnant cow eating roughly 2 percent of body weight in hay runs about 27 pounds a day on a 1,350-pound frame. At $175 a ton that is $2.36 a day, and at $200 a ton $2.70. Over a 150-day feeding period that is $354 to $405 a head before waste, delivery or supplement. Add 15 percent for feeding waste and the range becomes roughly $407 to $466 a head. That number is the one to put beside any decision in Section 14 about holding cattle or holding cows.

The Wyoming and Western Nebraska hay report (BL_GR310) has not been published since 2020 and is not a live source.

23. Sources

Every figure in this edition comes from a named public source. Where a figure is Honest Cattle’s own calculation or estimate, it is labeled as such in the section where it appears.

• USDA Agricultural Marketing Service — AMS_2461 National Weekly Boxed Beef Cutout (week ending 2026-09-11); AMS_1778 Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary (week ending 2026-09-05); AMS_1955 Texas Weekly Cattle Auction Summary (2026-09-06 through 2026-09-12); AMS_3228 National Retail Report — Beef (2026-09-11); AMS_2769 Montana Hay Report (2026-09-04, most recent print); NW_LS421 Import Beef Trade (2026-09-11); LM_CT150 5 Area Weekly Weighted Average Direct Slaughter Cattle (week ending 2026-09-06).
• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service — Actual Slaughter Under Federal Inspection (week ending 2026-09-12); Cattle on Feed (2026-08-21).
• USDA Risk Management Agency — Livestock Risk Protection daily premium and coverage files, sales effective date 2026-09-11.
• USDA Economic Research Service — Meat Price Spreads, Choice beef farmers’ share of the retail beef dollar, file updated 2026-09-11 with August data. Downloaded and parsed directly for this edition.
• USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service — New World Screwworm confirmed-detections dashboard, aphis.usda.gov/…/stop-screwworm/current-status/confirmed, read as of Saturday, 2026-09-12 (APHIS refreshes it Monday through Saturday at 6 p.m. ET). All Section 16 case counts, the monthly breakdown and the active-case detail are taken from that dashboard directly.
• CME Group — settlement prices for Live Cattle (LE), Feeder Cattle (GF) and Corn (ZC), 2026-09-11. Deferred-contract settlements cross-checked against a second public quote source.
• CFTC — Commitments of Traders, disaggregated futures-only, report date 2026-09-08.
• National Drought Mitigation Center / U.S. Drought Monitor — Montana state statistics and Drought Severity and Coverage Index, release date 2026-09-08.
• Auction houses — Billings Livestock Commission (2026-09-10) and Public Auction Yards, Billings (2026-09-09), from the houses’ own published sale results. The full twelve-barn Montana roster is maintained at honestcattle.net/montana-weekly-auction-results.
• Company disclosures and trade press — Tyson Foods investor guidance on fiscal 2026 beef-segment operating loss; reported industry per-head packer margin estimates; plant closure, sale and labour announcements from Tyson, JBS and Cargill. Used in Sections 9 and 10 for the packing-sector condition; per-head loss ranges are industry estimates rather than a single published series, and are presented as a range.
• White House and USDA — Executive Orders of September 4, 2026 (whitehouse.gov); USDA’s Ranchers First page (usda.gov/ranchers-first), read in full for the implementation ledger in Section 17; and the August 31, 2026 Ranchers First press release. BRAND premium, subsidy and availability figures in Section 17 are Honest Cattle estimates built on stated assumptions, because RMA has published none.

Methodology Notes

The forecast bands describe 550–599 and 600–649 pound Montana-origin steers and heifers, FOB auction, weaned load-lot cattle. That class definition matters: unweaned single-head and small-lot calves routinely sell roughly $40 to $50 per hundredweight below the load-lot market, and a barn print of an unweaned calf is not a test of these bands. Section 2 explains the accuracy-scorecard correction this edition makes on exactly that point.

The Honest Cattle Market Index (HCMI) is a four-component index, base 2024 = 100, weighted CME Feeder Cattle 42.1 percent, CME Live Cattle 26.3 percent, Montana 600–650 pound steer cash 21.1 percent, and boning cull cow 10.5 percent. It uses transacted prices only — no Honest Cattle estimates enter the index. Prints are marked provisional until the underlying USDA series for that week are final. The forward curve is built from deferred futures settlements and forward-delivery video sales of Montana-origin cattle.

The per-unit translation rates used in the sidebars throughout this report — dollars per hundredweight of calf bid per unit of signal move — are Honest Cattle’s codified estimates, calibrated on historical relationships under ordinary market conditions. They are not reliable when a signal moves several times its normal weekly range. This week’s 11.9 percent year-over-year slaughter decline is such a case, and Section 10 says so explicitly rather than multiplying it out to a false precision.

What this report is not. It is market analysis, not investment, tax or legal advice. Futures and options trading involves substantial risk of loss. Honest Cattle® is a registered trademark of Farm Animal Transparency LLC.

24. Comparison to Prior Week

Line by line against the September 7 edition, with the numbers behind every row.

What that table says in one paragraph. Twenty of the thirty-one lines above moved in the calf market’s favor. The exceptions that matter are the board’s feeding margin, which got $5.05 a head worse; the cull cow market, down a third straight week; severe drought, which deepened even as the statewide footprint improved; and this report’s own accuracy record, which worsened sharply for reasons Section 2 takes apart in full. The bands are held rather than raised because those four lines are the ones that would have to improve for a rally to last.