2026-11-09 Honest Cattle® Weekly Market Forecast

Full Weekly Forecast

Executive Summary

Montana’s fall bred-female run opened and it was where the money went this week: 2,233 bred females sold through the rings in five days, 409 of them bred heifers averaging $3,472 a head, with eleven more named sales still to come before Christmas. The calf market finally gave ground — 600-to-649-pound steers brought $400.35, down $5.76, and heifer calves fell four to eight percent, leaving them $64 and $69 a hundredweight under steers of the same weight. Feeder cattle futures fell a second straight 4 percent, fed cattle cash broke $6 to $8, and the cash support that had held this market up all autumn is gone. The premium grocers pay for Choice beef over Select collapsed 42 percent in one week to $7.85, below the line where quality stops getting paid for. We held our fourth-quarter steer forecast, lowered the heifer numbers again, cut both 2027 quarters with the futures market, and cut sentiment to 6.0 out of 10.

HCMI: 125.1, running 25.1 percent above the 2024 average, week ending November 7, 2026, and down 4.3 points on the week. About 0.7 of that fall is a contract change rather than a price change — the index rolled its feeder leg from the November contract to January, because there is no December feeder contract — so roughly 3.6 points is price; the print is provisional because USDA’s Montana figures for the week had not published when this was built. The forward curve came down about four points and is nearly flat, from 125.3 in December to 124.1 in May 2027, and every transacted leg in it is a price somebody has already paid rather than an Honest Cattle forecast; the rows marked carried repeat the last transacted print and are labelled as such. Full methodology: honestcattle.net/2026/06/23/montana-cattle-index.

What this week’s forecast covers

Each numbered entry below is a link into the research that follows. Read the summary straight through for the week in plain English, or follow any entry to the full section behind it.

• 1. Market Overview and the HCMI. The index reads 125.1, down 4.3 points, and we show you how much of that was a contract roll rather than a price fall. The forward curve came down four points and is nearly flat, which means the market is not paying you to wait.
• 2. Quarterly Forecast. We held the fourth-quarter steer numbers for the first time in a month, because our own scorecard says they are close to right. We lowered the heifer numbers again and cut both 2027 quarters with the futures market. Two corrections this week, both named with the right figure. Section 2.3 is the bred-female ledger, sale by sale.
• 3. Futures and Corn. Corn got cheaper for a sixth week and everything else fell again. This week there was a cause, and it was the cash fed-cattle market rather than a mystery. The cash feeder index came down too, which is the change from last week: Montana’s market is no longer arguing with the futures market.
• 4. Futures and Options. Who owned the bets, read off Friday’s government release. The corn funds walked out the door, which is friendly to a calf seller. The feeder funds barely moved while the price fell 4.6 percent, so the people who sold were somebody else and the crowded bet is still sitting there. Price insurance bought $14.44 less floor for the same money.
• 5. Montana Auctions. All twelve licensed markets accounted for; eight produced figures. Montana’s calves came down after three weeks of holding out, and the decline got steeper the heavier the animal. Rain cut receipts and thinned the buyer pools. The spread between barns is $35 a hundredweight, which is $205 a head.
• 6. Video Auctions. Correction: the video season had not closed. Superior sold calf lots on November 5 and there are four more sales before the year is out. The regional print came in below Montana’s own barn price for the same weight, which tells you how hard the forward market is discounting a calf.
• 7. Bred and Cull Cattle. The section that decides November’s cheque. 2,233 bred females through the rings, bred heifers at $3,472, young bred cows at $3,607 and broken-mouth cows at $2,354 — $1,253 a head from top to bottom. Presentation was worth $551 a head between two sales on the same Friday. The cull market came down because the feeding buyers backed off. Five things to do in the next six weeks.
• 8. Cash Fed Cattle. The settled print was strong and then the week broke underneath it. Friday’s trade was $208 to $215 live against a weekly average of $223.73. The important part is that cash has fallen to the futures price, so the support that was pulling this market up is gone.
• 9. Feedlot Profitability. The feedlot’s loss narrowed $41 a head to $173 — and it narrowed because Montana sold its heavy feeders $129 a head cheaper. That is the chain working, and the cost of it landed on a rancher. A feedlot that cannot pencil does not chase a bid, and the effect shows up three to six weeks out.
• 10. Boxed Beef. The quality premium collapsed 42 percent to $7.85 and in the chuck and the round Select beef is now worth more than Choice. The packer kept the difference: his margin widened. Grocers pushed beef hard into the holiday. And we finally name the three Montana routes into the grass-fed market — all of them require buying in, not selling in.
• 11. Slaughter and Packers. 534,000 head, down 6.2 percent on the year, with 1,772,000 fewer cattle killed so far in 2026. Heifers are 3.3 points less of the kill than a year ago, which is the most reliable bullish fact in this report. September’s record-low placements are still in front of the market.
• 12. Grid Pricing. What the quality premium is worth to your calf in dollars — about $35 a head now, down from $61 a week ago — and twelve months of the spread in one table. The premium for documented health protocol is now bigger than the whole beef-grid premium, which makes it the more durable of the two.
• 13. Rancher Share. 49.3 cents of every retail beef dollar reached the ranch in September and the index is plus 3.5 points — still green. But the packer’s slice more than tripled between July and September while both the rancher’s and the grocer’s shrank. USDA publishes October on November 10.
• 14. Weather. A mild, dry, quiet week after the rain that cut sale receipts. The featured mover is the severe-drought band, which was the only category on the map that moved. Good weather keeps cows out and cattle off the market, which is why Montana cash has fallen less than the futures market.
• 15. Moisture and Range. The drought index fell to 69, less than half what it was a year ago, and the autumn’s run is the 55th-best eight-week improvement in 27 years of weekly maps. The honest other half: extreme drought was at zero three months ago and is now 4.84 percent of the state, and it has not budged in two months.
• 16. Range Forage. Five numbered marketing decisions with dollars attached, for a state that has its grass back. Grazing days are worth $12 to $16 a cow a week, documented protocol $60 to $108 a head, sorting cull cows $183 a head. Three of the five do not depend on this forecast being right about anything.
• 17. Hay Prices. No new hay report this week; the current one is still October 30, and we say so rather than restate it as current. Confirmed trade was down 85 percent, because Montana does not need hay yet. Canadian hay delivered into the Hi-Line at $160 to $200 means geography is worth more than grade.
• 18. Screwworm. No new state and no new port decision. But the crossing volume quadrupled: 14,700 head of Mexican feeders in one week, against the 3,700 this report had been carrying. Nogales is still scheduled for November 30.
• 19. Imports and Policy. Nothing new landed, so this is short — but one carried figure was wrong and is corrected. Beef exports ran 29 percent below their four-week average and the West Coast port contract was extended rather than settled. The origin-labelling review deadline is about three and a half weeks out, and it is a study rather than a policy.
• 20. Sentiment. Cut to 6.0 from 6.5, with the signal table the score reconciles against. The table is positive on all three horizons and we cut anyway — because the table cannot see the fed-cattle price or the feeder price, and this week those were the whole story. We say so and we are going to fix it.
• 21. Risks. What could break next week, in order of what it would cost. Montana cash converging the rest of the way down to the futures price is first and it is worth $90 to $150 a head. The November 20 Cattle on Feed report is the most likely source of a bounce. The bred-female sales are the opportunity rather than the risk.
• 22. Sources. Every report and date used in this edition, grouped by agency.
• 23. Comparison to Prior Week. Every headline figure against last week. The one-line version: everything made of paper fell, the cash fed market broke, Montana’s calves finally gave ground, and every class of bred female went up.

What’s New in Honest Cattle

The bred-female run opened, the fourth-quarter steer forecast is held for the first time in a month, and two figures from last week are corrected.

Forecast Research

1. Market Overview and the HCMI

The Honest Cattle Market Index (HCMI) reads 125.1 for the week ending November 7, 2026, down 4.3 points on the week. The index measures cattle revenue conditions against the 2024 calendar year, which is set at 100. So 125.1 means a Montana outfit is selling into conditions about 25 percent better than the 2024 average. Rising means improving price conditions. It measures revenue, not profit, and it is not a forecast and not advice.

This week the paper market fell again and Montana finally followed it down a little. The January 2027 feeder cattle contract settled Friday November 6 at $318.38 a hundredweight, down $13.40 from $331.78 — a 4.0 percent decline. The December live cattle contract settled at $214.05, down $6.90 from $220.95, a 3.1 percent decline. Against their 2024 bases the feeder leg stands at 128.3 and carries 42.1 percent of the index weight; live cattle stand at 116.5 at 26.3 percent; the Montana steer leg stands at 136.8 at 21.1 percent; and the Montana boning cull cow stands at 110.5 at 10.5 percent.

Part of this week’s fall is a contract change rather than a price change, and here is how much. The index prices its feeder leg off the nearest listed contract month after the week being measured. There is no December feeder cattle contract, so this week the leg moved from the November contract to the January one. January trades below November. Had the leg stayed on the November contract at $322.33, the index would read about 125.8 instead of 125.1. So roughly 0.7 of the 4.3-point fall is the contract change and roughly 3.6 points is price. The convention has not changed and no past value needed correcting; this is the roll working as designed, and it is said out loud because a reader comparing week to week deserves to know.

This print is provisional, and the flag means something specific. USDA’s Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary covering the week ending November 7 had not published when this edition was built, so both Montana legs carry USDA’s last print — the week ending October 31, at $404.96 for the 600-to-649-pound steer and $138.16 for the boning cull cow. They are real USDA figures, not estimates, but they describe the week before the one in the headline. The number reconciles when USDA posts, normally Monday or Tuesday.

Full methodology and how to read it: honestcattle.net/2026/06/23/montana-cattle-index.

1.1  The HCMI Forward Curve

The same index priced off cattle that have already been bought and sold for delivery in future months. No leg of it is an Honest Cattle forecast: the transacted legs are prices already paid, and the carried legs repeat the last transacted print and are labelled as such in the table below. The feeder and live cattle legs are deferred contract settlements from Friday November 6. The December month’s Montana steer leg comes from forward-delivery video sales — 280 head of 600-to-649-pound steers at $407.61, pooled from Northern Livestock Video’s September 14 sale and Superior Livestock’s November 6 sale. That is a seven-state North Central regional figure, not a Montana price, and it is used only because no Montana-only December lots exist. From January onward no calf has been bought that far ahead, so the Montana leg is carried at USDA’s last print and the table says so. The cull cow leg is carried throughout.

The curve is nearly flat and it has come down about four points. December reads 125.3, May 2027 reads 124.1, and every month in between sits inside a 1.5-point range. A flat forward curve says the market is not paying a rancher to wait. It is also the market’s own pricing rather than anybody’s opinion, which is the whole point of printing it.

The translation for a calf seller. A flat forward curve removes the argument for holding calves to chase a higher market, and a curve that fell four points in a week removes it twice over. The futures market is not paying for time — it says May 2027 pays about 1.2 points less on this index than December does. Anyone weighing a sale at weaning against backgrounding into late winter is being told that the price will not do the work; the gain has to. Section 16 puts numbers on that decision and Section 17 prices the feed it takes. The one caveat worth repeating every week: the video leg behind December is a forward price with a price slide attached, not spot Montana cash, and it is a seven-state regional figure that includes Montana rather than describing it.

2. 2026 Montana Quarterly Forecast

Honest Cattle forecasts Montana calf prices in two tight weight bands — 550 to 599 pounds and 600 to 649 pounds — for steers and heifers, extended through the fourth quarter of 2027. The near quarters are our own forecast. The 2027 rows further out are derived from the futures market and labelled as such; they are a direction, not a price. All bands describe weaned, load-lot, Montana-origin cattle sold FOB the auction.

The fourth-quarter steer numbers are held. The heifer numbers come down again, and both 2027 quarters take the full futures-implied price cut. Those are three different decisions and each one has a reason.

Fourth-quarter 2026 steers are held, and the evidence says hold them. This report now has ten paired observations inside the fourth quarter, and across those ten the midpoints have been wrong by an average of $1.62 a hundredweight with a typical miss of $3.78. That is as close as this forecast has been. This week’s Montana barn prints come to $418.80 on the light band and $400.35 on the heavy band; on a weaned load-lot basis those are $463.80 and $445.35 against published midpoints of $468 and $445. Cutting a band that is sitting within five dollars of realized, in a quarter that is five-sixths sold, would be chasing noise rather than forecasting.

The heifer numbers come down $8 on both fourth-quarter bands, and this is the third week running they have moved. Montana heifer calves sold $64.19 and $69.18 a hundredweight under steers of the same weight this week, against $52.18 and $46.09 last week. The fourth-quarter heifer midpoints come down to $410 and $392, which are discounts of $58 and $53. We did not take the whole of this week’s gap into the bands, and the reason is sample: the heavy-band heifer figure rests on 120 head and the quality mix was plainer than last week’s. If the gap holds at $65 or wider for another week, these cells come down again and this report will say so.

Both 2027 quarters take the full futures-implied cut, for the second week running. The January 2027 feeder contract fell 4.0 percent in five days and March fell 4.1 percent; April fell 4.0 percent and May 3.7 percent. First-quarter 2027 light-band steers come down $18 to $438 and the heavy band $17 to $412. Second-quarter 2027 light band comes down $17 to $427 and the heavy band $16 to $401. We are not softening it. The six-month look-back scorecard below says plainly that this report’s standing failure is coming down after the market instead of ahead of it, and softening a futures-implied cut is exactly how that failure happens.

The heifer discount narrows through 2027, and that is a seasonal call rather than a hopeful one. The discount runs $58 and $53 in the fourth quarter of 2026, $50 and $46 in the first quarter of 2027, and $40 and $36 in the second. Heifer calves get pulled out of the feeding pipeline in spring when ranchers buy replacements, and that competition is what closes the gap. This week gave the first hard evidence for it in the other direction: Montana rings sold 409 bred heifers at an average of $3,472 a head. A rancher who can hold a good heifer calf through to a bred female is being paid handsomely to do it, and that is the same demand that narrows the calf-level discount in spring.

2.1  The 2027 extension

The table below extends the calf forecast through the fourth quarter of 2027. The 2027 rows are rebuilt from the deferred feeder cattle settlements every week this report publishes, so they move with the futures market rather than sitting where they were first written. Friday November 6’s settlements were lower right across the strip: the August 2027 contract settled at $312.83, down $10.33 on the week, and September 2027 at $310.85, down $9.83. Those settlements lower the third-quarter 2027 steer midpoint to $427 from $441 and the fourth-quarter 2027 midpoint to $422 from $431. Read them as the futures market’s direction and nothing firmer; the ranges are deliberately $25 wide, $30 in the last quarter.

One method change this week, stated because it moves a published cell. The 2027 rows are built by taking the ratio of a published near-quarter forecast to the futures contracts that settle inside that quarter, and applying it to the deferred contracts. The October 2026 feeder contract expired on October 29, so the fourth quarter of 2026 can no longer be calibrated on the average of the October and November contracts — it is now the November contract alone, which is the only listed contract settling inside the quarter, because there is no December feeder contract. That raises the fourth-quarter 2026 calibration ratio from 1.3584 to 1.4520, not because Montana cash got dearer against the futures market in any meaningful way but because the window lost its costlier leg to expiry while the published midpoint was held. Using that ratio for the fourth quarter of 2027 would have marked that cell up in a week when every contract fell, which is nonsense, so the fourth quarter of 2027 is now derived from the second-quarter 2027 ratio of 1.3690 — the nearest quarter still calibrated on two live contracts. The third quarter of 2027 already used that ratio. Nothing else in the method changed.

The bred female and cull cow table carries the same horizon. Its anchors are re-set each week on real Montana prints, and this week every one of them is a fresh print from the week’s own sales. The bred heifer cell is re-anchored on 409 head of Montana-origin bred heifers at $3,472 a head, against a cell that was carried on 118 head going back to mid-October. The running-age bred cow cell is re-anchored on 269 head of Montana cows aged five and over at $2,783. The cull cow cell is re-anchored on 825 head of boning cows at Montana’s four USDA-reported barns at $135.08 a hundredweight, then de-seasonalised and re-seasonalised across the quarters. A real Montana print replaces the rule for any cell the week it exists, and this week four cells got one.

2.2  Forecast Accuracy & Calibration

This sub-section exists so a rancher knows how much weight to put on the bands above. We grade our own past calls every week, print the result whether it flatters us or not, and tell you what the error pattern means for this week’s number. Every figure below is interpreted in plain English, because a bare statistic is no use to anyone standing in a sale ring.

Corrections this week: two. Both are stated plainly below with the right figure, and both are also corrected inline in the section they touch.

One: the video season had not closed. Last week’s edition said the 2026 video and internet sale season was over and that the next broadcast touching Montana cattle was a bred-female sale on December 1. That was wrong. Superior Livestock sold calf lots on November 5, including 377 head of 600-to-649-pound steers in the seven-state North Central region at $396.54, and it has further sales catalogued for November 19, December 3 and December 17. Western Video Market has one on December 2. The correct statement is that calf-lot video selling continues at reduced volume through December. Section 6 carries the week’s prints and the full calendar.

Two: the Mexican feeder cattle import rate was understated by about four times. Last week’s edition put imported Mexican feeders at “about 3,700 head a week.” That figure was a fourteen-week average taken across the border’s phased reopening, and it was used as though it described the current week. USDA’s own weekly import summary for the week ending November 6 shows 14,700 head — 7,550 through Douglas, Arizona, 6,100 through Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and 1,050 through Columbus, New Mexico. The ports have ramped. The calf-bid translation in Section 19 is rebuilt on the right number and the headwind is larger than this report has been carrying.

Nothing else in this edition changed. The rancher’s share of the retail beef dollar still reads 49.3 percent for September 2026 — a net farm value of 490.7 cents a pound against a Choice beef retail value of 994.4 cents — checked again this week directly against USDA’s own published file. USDA last updated that series on October 14 and publishes October’s figure on November 10. The index value, the Montana prints, the beef cutout, the slaughter numbers and the positioning figures all reconcile against their sources.

Every comparison-to-history in this edition carries its ranking. Montana’s cash premium over the futures price is $78.03 a hundredweight, the ninth-widest of the 68 weeks since January 2024 in which Montana actually printed a 600-to-649-pound trade — eight weeks were wider, the widest $105.83 in the week ending February 28, 2026. Corn at $4.4150 a bushel sits at the 56th percentile of the last ten years, above its ten-year median of $4.2750. The drought index’s 87-point improvement over eight weeks is the 55th-largest of 1,393 rolling eight-week windows since 2000. And the collapse in corn fund positioning is the 60th-largest weekly change in 616 weeks since 2015. None of those is a record, and each of them is more useful for being ranked.

Current-vintage accuracy

Sixteen paired observations, two more than last week. The typical miss is $14.18 a hundredweight — in a normal week our band’s midpoint is off by about that much in one direction or the other, which on a 575-pound calf is roughly $82 a head. That is the headline accuracy number and the one to lead with, and it improved from $15.81 last week. The bias is minus $12.83, and the minus sign means we forecast high: on average the cattle have brought $12.83 a hundredweight less than our midpoint said they would, about $74 a head on a 575-pound calf. That improved from minus $14.98. The mean percentage error is minus 2.97 percent, the same lean expressed as a fraction of price.

The overall bias is now carried almost entirely by September, and that matters for how you read this week’s band. Six of the sixteen pairs are from the third quarter, when our bands ran $25 to $45 high. The ten pairs inside the fourth quarter show a bias of minus $1.62 and a typical miss of $3.78. The fourth-quarter numbers above are, on the evidence, close to right. The older misses are real and stay in the ledger, but a rancher using the fourth-quarter band this week should weight the recent ten pairs, not the full sixteen.

Root mean squared error is $20.58, the typical-miss figure with big misses weighted more heavily; it sits $6.40 above the typical miss, so a few larger busts from September are stretching the average without dominating it. Mean squared error is 423.74, which is not in dollars and is not meant to be read directly — it exists to punish large misses and to produce the root mean squared error above.

The calibration regression fits actual price against our forecast and comes out with a slope of 0.559, an intercept of $189.80 and an R-squared of 0.218. A slope near 1.0 with an intercept near zero would mean our forecast moves dollar for dollar with reality. A slope of 0.559 means we over-react: when we move our band a dollar, the market moves about fifty-six cents. The R-squared says our forecast explains about 22 percent of the swing in realized calf prices, which is not much, and we would rather say so than dress it up.

Six-month look-back accuracy

Sixteen paired observations, and the honest headline is that this is still not a six-month look-back. Our frozen forecast archive starts on July 6, 2026, so the oldest band we can grade is 18 weeks old, not 26. The lags actually present run from 9 to 17 weeks across 17 frozen vintages. A fully automatic twenty-six-week look-back begins with the edition of roughly January 4, 2027. We will not manufacture a history that does not exist.

On the window we do have: bias minus $43.27, typical miss $43.27, mean percentage error minus 9.81 percent, root mean squared error $48.45, slope 0.202, R-squared 0.047. Every one of those is far worse than the current-vintage figures, and the gap is the finding. Graded against the band in force the week the cattle sold we are $13 high; graded against the band we published three to four months earlier we are $43 high. That means this report has been tracking the market rather than anticipating it. A rancher who read our July band and planned a fourth-quarter sale around it would have planned around a number $43 a hundredweight too high — about $249 a head on a 575-pound calf. Weight the look-back figure, not the current one, when you are using this forecast to make a decision months ahead. That is what the forecast is for, and it is the number that earns or loses the trust. It is also the direct reason both 2027 quarters above took the full futures-implied price cut this week rather than half of it.

Five pairs were unscoreable and are excluded rather than graded against the nearest available series: two from May 4, one from May 18, one from June 8 and one from June 29, all for the same reason — no frozen vintage was in force for that band in that week. A scorecard that silently drops what it cannot measure is worse than one that admits the gap.

What the error pattern says about this week’s band. Read the two scorecards differently this week, because for the first time they are telling different stories. On the fourth quarter the current-vintage scorecard says the midpoint is close to right: plan on $445 for a weaned load of 600-to-649-pound steers, not $430 and not $460. On 2027 the look-back says lean to the bottom of the range and keep leaning until the archive is long enough to say otherwise — a $412 first-quarter midpoint should be planned around as $380 to $400 rather than $412. The sample is large enough to act on, sixteen pairs against a threshold of eight, but it is sixteen pairs from one autumn.

What comes next for the scorecard. We will test which of this report’s five signal sections actually move the Montana calf bid and by how much, and publish the result — including the finding that some of them do not. That work needs a longer run of weekly readings than we have, and we are not going to hand-fit coefficients in the meantime and call them a model.

The acronyms. n — number of paired forecast-and-actual observations. Bias — the average miss with its direction, in $/cwt; negative means we forecast high. MPE — mean percentage error, the same lean as a percentage of price. MAD — mean absolute deviation, the typical miss size with direction ignored. MSE — mean squared error, not in dollars, used only to build RMSE. RMSE — root mean squared error, the typical miss with large misses weighted more heavily. R-squared — the share of the swing in realized prices our forecast explains, from 0 to 1.

2.3  Montana bred females — this fall’s sales so far

Montana bred heifers and bred cows sell through the sale rings, and the fall bred-female specials run from late October through December. This table carries every Montana-origin bred-female sale this report can see, season to date, newest first, so a reader can check our bred-female numbers against what cattle actually brought. Three words first, because the whole table turns on them. Solid mouth means a cow still has her full set of permanent teeth and can hold condition on range. Broken mouth means she has started losing them, which shortens how many calves are left in her. A trimester rating — T1, T2, T3 — is how far along she is; T2 and T3 cows calve sooner and sell for more. A first-cycle female is bred in the first round of the breeding season, so she calves early and her calf is older and heavier at weaning.

Montana-origin cattle only. At Dillon, consignments from Rigby, Idaho Falls, Terreton and Leadore in Idaho and from Afton in Wyoming are excluded from the Montana rows rather than averaged into them; those out-of-state bred cows averaged $3,057 on 206 head, above the Montana-origin average at the same sale, and the two are not like for like on age or sort. North Dakota consignments at Sidney are excluded the same way.

The fall bred-female run opened and it is where the money went in this edition. Montana rings sold 2,233 bred females in five days — 409 bred heifers and 1,824 bred cows priced per head, plus another 37 cows sold by weight. A week ago the same count was about 1,079 head. Four named sales did most of it: the Weaver Ranch sale at Lewistown and the First Annual Fall Female Roundup at Public Auction Yards, both on Friday November 6, Dillon’s Special Bred Cow sale on Thursday, and Sidney’s Saturday sale. Anybody who has read that Montana bred females are sold mainly by the truckload off a video screen should look at that number again. They sell through the ring, in volume, and the biggest sales of the year are still ahead.

Bred heifers finally got tested, and our number was low. Across four Montana rings, 409 head of bred heifers averaged $3,472 in a range of $2,250 to $4,350. That is the largest bred-heifer sample in this report’s fall ledger — against 116 head in the mid-October composite and four head a week ago. Our fourth-quarter bred heifer cell had been carried at $3,180. It is re-anchored this week at the realized figure. The quality gradient inside that 409 head is the lesson: Weaver’s 92 home-raised, first-cycle heifers out of Big Sandy averaged $3,910 and topped at $4,350, while the mixed run at Public Auction Yards averaged $3,359 and the plainest Medium-frame sets there brought $2,483. Presentation and breeding date were worth $551 a head between those two sales on the same Friday.

Age and mouth are worth more than the market moved, again. Young bred cows — coming threes and fours, aged two to four — brought $3,607 a head on 734 head. Solid-mouth cows five and over brought $2,783 on 269 head. Broken-mouth cows over eight brought $2,354 on 491 head. That is $824 between a young cow and a running-age cow, and another $429 for the mouth — $1,253 a head from the top of the age range to the bottom. For comparison, the whole feeder futures break this week was worth about $80 a head on a 600-pound calf. On bred females, how you sort, age and present the cows is worth fifteen times what the market did.

And young bred cows outsold bred heifers this week, which is unusual and has a plain cause. $3,607 for young cows against $3,472 for heifers. A bred heifer has never calved, so she carries calving risk a buyer has to price; a coming-four cow with one calf behind her does not. The Weaver draft was 437 head of coming threes and fours sorted by calving cycle, bull type and frame, which is about as low-risk as a bred cow gets. When cows are presented that well they beat heifers. When they are not, heifers win.

Two pricing bases are in that table and they are not interchangeable. A cow sold per head has been pregnancy-checked and mouthed at the yard and is being bought as a breeding female. A cow sold per hundredweight is usually ranch tested — checked bred at home, not retested or mouthed at the yard — and the buyer is pricing her partly as weight. Miles City’s 37 ranch-tested cows at $203.69 a hundredweight work out to about $2,620 a head. Over 2,000 cows were pregnancy-checked for Friday’s sale at Public Auction Yards. Getting cows mouthed and pregnancy-checked at the yard was worth a few hundred dollars a head again this week, and on a 40-cow draft that is real money for a vet bill and a morning’s work.

The calendar, because the price and the date are the same decision. Montana’s remaining named bred-female specials: Montana Livestock at Ramsay’s Skinner Female Sale November 10; the Arntzen Angus Signature Commercial Female Sale at Lewistown November 13; Miles City’s Fall Classic Stock Cow & Bred Heifer Sale November 20; Lewistown’s Heart of the Herd I and II on November 20 and 24; Sidney’s Thanksgiving Bred Cow Special November 21; the Sundling & Lane Ranch Female Sale December 1; Miles City’s Trailhead Stock Cow & Bred Heifer Sale December 4; Public Auction Yards’ Annual Blue Ribbon Stock Cow and Bred Heifer Special December 8–9; Lewistown’s Stock Cow Central Bred Special December 15; Public Auction Yards’ Annual Northland Stock Cow & Bred Heifer Special December 18; and Sidney’s Christmas Bred Cow Special December 19. The full calendar is at honestcattle.net/featured-montana-cattle-sales.

The translation to a calf seller. A running-age bred cow at $2,783 and a bred heifer at $3,472 against a 600-pound steer calf at $400.35 — $2,402 a head — means a Montana rancher can buy a running-age bred female for about 1.16 calves and a bred heifer for about 1.45. A week ago the running-age cow cost 1.06 calves, so she got dearer, not cheaper, and by a full tenth of a calf. Two things did that: the calf price came down 1.4 percent, and the cow market firmed into the specials. A rancher selling calves to buy cows is on the wrong side of both moves this week. A rancher selling cows into the specials is on the right side of both. Section 7 reads the replacement composition for the forward calf-supply signal.

3. CME Futures and Corn

Corn first, because corn is what decides whether a feedlot can pay up for a Montana calf. The December corn contract settled Friday November 6 at $4.4150 a bushel, down 6 and a quarter cents from $4.4775 — a 1.4 percent decline. March 2027 corn settled at $4.5525, down 5 and three-quarter cents from $4.61, a 1.2 percent decline. Corn has now fallen six weeks running and is down about 16 percent from early October. Be careful how you read the level, though. At $4.4150 corn sits at the 56th percentile of the last ten years — above its ten-year median of $4.2750, in a range that runs from $3.08 to $8.18. Corn is not cheap by historical standards. It is falling steadily, which is a different and more useful fact for a calf seller.

Everything else fell for the second week running. The November feeder cattle contract settled at $322.33, down $15.45 from $337.78 — a 4.6 percent decline. The January 2027 contract settled at $318.38, down $13.40, a 4.0 percent decline. March fell $13.43, April $12.93, May $12.00, August $10.33 and September $9.83 — every deferred feeder contract this report reads lost between 3.1 and 4.6 percent, with the nearest months losing the most. The December live cattle contract settled at $214.05, down $6.90, a 3.1 percent decline, and the February 2027 contract at $217.20, down $7.00.

This week there was a cause, and it was the cash fed-cattle market. Last week’s break came with no news attached. This one did not. Fed cattle traded $6 to $8 a hundredweight lower through the week in the feedlot states, and the futures price followed. A DTN livestock analyst put the week’s trade at mostly $218 in the South, “which is $6 lower than last week’s weighted average,” and Northern dressed cattle at mostly $340, “$8 to $25 lower than the previous week’s weighted average.” By Friday some live trade was being done at $208 to $215 and a little in Nebraska at $210. The same analyst said the lower trend is likely to continue “until something worthwhile develops fundamentally in the cattle complex, which will likely either be strong trade in the fed cash cattle market or a bullish Cattle on Feed report.” The next Cattle on Feed report is November 20. Section 8 prices the fed-cattle break and Section 4 shows who owned the position going into it.

The feeder cattle cash index came down too, and that is the change from last week. The CME Feeder Cattle Index — the seven-day average of actual auction sales of 700-to-899-pound feeders across twelve states, which is what the feeder contract settles against — stood at $337.41 as of November 5, down $5.35 that day alone and about $14 on the week from $351.43. The November contract at $322.33 settled $15.08 under that index. Futures trading below the cash index they settle against is the futures market betting that cash feeder prices fall further over the next few weeks. Last week the index was rising while futures fell, and this report said the cash market was disagreeing with the futures market. This week the cash index is falling too. That disagreement is closing, and it is closing the way the futures market said it would.

3.1  The feeder-to-corn ratio

The ratio is the feeder contract divided by the corn price per bushel. It says how expensive a feeder calf is in units of the corn it takes to finish him. This week it is 73.0, down from 75.4 — a 2.4-point decline, and it fell because feeders fell faster than corn. On the series this report can actually measure — 140 weeks from January 2024 — 73.0 is the 59th percentile, and it is below this year’s average of 77.9. So feeders are expensive against their feed by the standard of a normal year, but not by the standard of the last two: 58 of those 140 weeks were at or above where the ratio sits now. The ten-year 55-to-65 range this report has carried is a carried figure with no series behind it, and it is labelled that way until a ten-year feeder history is built.

SIDEBAR — FEEDER/CORN RATIO -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week: 73.0 - 59th pctile of 140 measured weeks (2024-01-13 on); 2026 avg 77.9
Carried, unmeasured: a 10-yr range of ~55-65 (no series behind it yet)
Change from prior week: -2.4 points
Per 1.0-point move: +/-$0.20-$0.35/cwt - +/-$1.20-$2.10/head on 600-lb calf
Direction this week: mildly bearish
Lag: 1-2 weeks

The translation. A 2.4-point decline in the ratio is worth about 48 to 84 cents a hundredweight off the Montana calf bid, $3 to $5 a head on a 600-pound calf, inside one to two weeks. That is small next to the $15.45 the feeder contract lost. The ratio matters here as a level rather than as a change: at the 59th percentile of the measured series a feedlot is paying a high price for a calf relative to what it costs to feed him, and it is doing so because there is no alternative supply.

3.2  The feed-cost pass-through check

This is a standing check. It uses the feed-cost pass-through framework developed at Montana State University’s Agricultural Marketing Policy Center by John Marsh, re-estimated by Honest Cattle on current USDA monthly data through September 2026 — we borrow the method, not the old coefficients. It answers one question: how much of the calf price is explained by feed and fed-cattle fundamentals, and how much is the scarcity premium that comes from a cowherd at a 75-year low?

The two numbers that matter. Every 10 percent rise in corn takes about 2.3 percent off calf value, with fed-cattle prices held still. Every 10 percent rise in fed cattle adds about 14.3 percent to calf value. That second number is the leverage in the calf market and the reason this report spends so much space on the fed-cattle price: a calf is a geared bet on what a finished steer brings seven months from now.

The decomposition, on September data. With corn near $4.28 a bushel, down 4 percent from a year ago, and fed cattle up 11 percent year over year, the model implies Montana feeder steers should be about 16.8 percent above where they were a year ago. Montana 600-to-649-pound feeder steers actually averaged $453.06 in the model’s window, 16.8 percent above a year ago. That leaves a scarcity residual of zero. The model fits the levels with an R-squared of 0.962 and, tested out of sample on 2023 onward after training on data through 2022, misses by about 7.6 percent. September is the most recent monthly figure USDA has published; the October data lands later this month.

What zero means, and it is the most important sentence in this section. Everything a Montana rancher is being paid for a calf right now is explained by falling corn and dear fed cattle. None of it is a premium for the fact that there are fewer cattle in the country than at any time since 1951. That is the fourth week running this residual has read at or near zero, and it is why a three percent price cut on the fed-cattle futures market translates straight through to the calf bid instead of being cushioned. The herd is tight; the market is not currently paying extra for it. The estimates are Honest Cattle’s own, current, and describe an association in the data — not a forecast of the calf price, and not trading advice. The model deliberately leaves out the herd cycle, drought and packer capacity, and that exclusion is exactly what lets it isolate the scarcity premium.

The translation. Run the leverage backwards on this week’s move. Fed cattle fell 3.1 percent on the December contract. At 14.3 percent of calf value per 10 percent of fed cattle, that is about 4.4 percent off calf value, or roughly $18 a hundredweight and $107 a head on a 600-pound calf, over a four-to- eight-week window — if it sticks. Corn falling 1.4 percent gives back about 0.3 percent, worth $1.30 a hundredweight and $8 a head. The net implied is minus $17 a hundredweight and minus $99 a head. Montana cash gave up $5.76 a hundredweight this week, which is a third of that. The gap between what the chain implies and what Montana has actually done is the central tension in this edition, and it is smaller than it was a week ago.

4. Futures and Options Activity

This section reads what the paper market is doing beyond the closing price. A few words get used throughout and each one means something plain. The funds — USDA and the futures regulator call them managed money — are investment firms betting on price direction. Producers and merchants are the feedlots, packers and cattle owners using the market as insurance rather than as a bet. Swap dealers are banks passing on someone else’s exposure. Open interest is the number of contracts still open — bets not yet closed out. Concentration is how much of one side is held by the four or eight largest holders. All of the ownership figures come from the futures regulator’s own weekly release, published Friday November 6 and describing positions as of Tuesday November 3.

4.1  The tape

The November feeder cattle contract settled Friday at $322.33, down $15.45 on the week. The December live cattle contract settled at $214.05, down $6.90, and December corn at $4.4150, down 6 and a quarter cents. Everything after this paragraph is what the closing prices do not tell you.

4.2  Flow quality — was this selling, or just people leaving?

Price and open interest read together tell you what kind of move it was. Price down with open interest down means existing bets are being closed out. Price down with open interest up means fresh selling is arriving. The two are very different for what happens next.

Feeder cattle: positions being closed, not new bets against the market. Total feeder cattle open interest fell 5.9 percent to 61,138 contracts while the price fell 4.6 percent. That is bets being unwound rather than a crowd of new sellers arriving. A move made of people leaving is less durable than a move made of people arriving, which is mildly encouraging. For the record, the contract-level figures from Friday: the November contract traded 2,675 contracts against 6,731 still open; January traded 14,677 against 28,174 open; March 7,838 against 13,063.

Live cattle: longs leaving and some fresh selling. Live cattle open interest was essentially flat, down 0.4 percent to 287,478 contracts, while the price fell 3.1 percent. Flat open interest on a falling price means buyers left and sellers took their place one for one. The December contract traded 34,881 against 88,086 open; February 28,749 against 69,753.

Corn: fresh selling, which is the one that matters to a feeder. Corn open interest rose 3.2 percent to 1,918,622 contracts while the price fell 1.4 percent. That is new money selling corn rather than old money leaving, and new selling is the more durable kind. December corn carries 689,523 contracts open and March 547,527.

4.3  Ownership — who actually holds the bets

Feeder cattle. The funds hold 21,465 contracts betting the price rises against 7,868 betting it falls — a net long of 13,597 contracts, down only 597 on the week. That net long is bigger than it was in 489 of the 617 weeks since 2015, so the funds are still crowded onto the bullish side. Forty-five funds hold the long side, an average of 477 contracts each. The feedlots and cattle owners are net short 3,860 contracts, and they reduced that short by 1,076 — their short side is insurance against the cattle they own, not a bet the market falls. The banks are net long 7,930. Other large traders are net short 14,530 and the small traders net short 3,137. The four largest holders own 13.7 percent of the long side and 18.5 percent of the short side.

Live cattle. The funds are net long 49,691 contracts, down 6,882 on the week, which is a bigger retreat than in feeders. That position is bigger than it was in 221 of the 617 weeks since 2015 — middling rather than crowded. Seventy-five funds hold the long side at an average of 971 contracts each. The packers and feedlots are net short 95,127 contracts, which is the largest insurance position in this report, and the banks are net long 71,288. The four largest holders own 14.1 percent of the long side and 15.4 percent of the short side.

Corn, and this is the week’s single most material ownership fact. The funds went from net long 81,113 contracts to net long 8,795 — a drop of 72,318 contracts in one week. They have gone from a sizeable bet that corn rises to very nearly no bet at all. That is the 60th-largest weekly change in the 616 weeks since 2015, so it is a big move and not an unheard-of one. The level that remains sits at the 53rd percentile of those 616 weeks. The farmers and grain merchants are net short 411,258 contracts and the banks net long 273,742.

Put the two together and you get the week’s read. In corn the money that had been betting on higher prices walked out, which is why corn keeps easing — and cheaper corn is the one thing in this edition that is unambiguously good for a Montana calf seller. In feeder cattle the funds barely moved while the price fell 4.6 percent, which means the selling did not come from a change in the funds’ net position. The crowded fund long is still sitting there at the 79th percentile of eleven years. That is the risk still in front of the market: if that position does start to unwind, the selling this week was not it. Section 21 carries it as a named risk.

4.4  The curve and the futures market’s own feeding margin

The November-over-January feeder spread narrowed to $3.95 from $6.00, so the nearest month lost more than the deferred ones — the market is marking down today harder than next spring. The January-over-March spread held at $4.53 against $4.50. In live cattle, February still trades $3.15 over December, almost unchanged from $3.25.

The futures market’s own feeding margin improved sharply, and the reason is worth reading. Take the standard animal this report uses every week: sell 12.5 hundredweight of finished steer on the February live cattle contract, buy 7.5 hundredweight of feeder on the November contract, and feed 55 bushels of December corn. That pencils to $54.73 a head, gross of every cost that is not feed — up $31.80 from $22.93 a week ago. It is still well short of covering yardage, interest, death loss and labour, so it is not a profit. But it moved the right way, and it moved because the feeder got cheaper faster than the finished steer did. That is the chain starting to work: when the feedlot’s input price comes down, the feedlot can bid again.

The fed-cattle basis has closed. The December live cattle contract settled at $214.05 against a negotiated cash print of $223.73 for the week ending November 2 — cash $9.68 over the futures price. But this week’s trade came in at $208 to $218, which is right on top of the futures price. For most of the autumn cash ran above futures and pulled the market up. That support is gone.

4.5  The translation to a Montana calf bid

Paper-market positioning leads the cash market by days to weeks. Two signals point opposite ways this week. The corn position says feed costs keep easing, which is worth about plus $1 to plus $2 a hundredweight, $6 to $12 a head on a 600-pound calf over two to four weeks. The still-crowded fund long in feeders is a downside risk rather than a current price effect: if it unwinds the way the live cattle long partly did this week, it is worth minus $5 to minus $10 a hundredweight, $30 to $60 a head, over two to six weeks. Net, this report reads positioning as mildly negative near term and the risk as one-sided to the downside.

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.

4.6  The LRP Corner

Livestock Risk Protection, or LRP, is federal price insurance for cattle. You pay a premium and if the published feeder cattle index ends up below your coverage price on your chosen end date, the policy pays the difference. It works like a price floor. There are no margin calls, you buy it through a crop-insurance agent, and the federal government pays 35 to 55 percent of the premium depending on how high a floor you pick.

Friday November 6’s rates, for Montana feeder steers in the 600-to-900-pound class, priced per 600-pound calf. This is a Sunday build, so Friday’s rate sheet is the current one. A policy ending February 5, 2027 — thirteen weeks out — at the full 100 percent coverage level sets a floor of $317.18 a hundredweight. The producer premium — the part a rancher actually pays after the federal subsidy — is $9.69 a hundredweight, or $58.16 a head. Drop to 95 percent coverage and the floor is $301.32 for $4.82 a hundredweight, $28.90 a head. Looking out to next fall, a policy ending September 3, 2027 sets a floor of $312.03 for $16.85 a hundredweight, $101.11 a head, or $296.42 for $69.68 a head at 95 percent.

Here is what moved, and it is the sharpest number in this section. A week ago the same thirteen-week policy bought a floor of $331.62. This week it buys $317.18. The premium barely changed — $58.07 a head last week against $58.16 this week. So a rancher paid the same money for $14.44 a hundredweight less protection, which is $87 a head of floor that disappeared in five days. That is how price insurance works: it reprices off the futures market every single day, so the cost of waiting a week to buy it was $87 a head of coverage. Note too that no fall 2026 end dates remain on the rate sheet; the nearest window now ends in February.

Set that floor against the market. The January feeder contract is at $318.38 and the cash feeder index at $337.41. A 100 percent February floor of $317.18 sits essentially on top of the January contract, which is what you would expect — the insurance is priced off the same futures market. What it buys is certainty, not an advantage.

Two cautions that never change, and one new program to watch. LRP settles on the CME Feeder Cattle Index, not on what a rancher gets for his own calves at his own barn, so basis risk remains: the index can finish above your floor while your own sale comes in below it. Rates reset every single sales day. Honest Cattle does not recommend buying it and does not recommend skipping it. The program worth watching is the proposed BRAND endorsement — Beef Retention and National Development — which would insure the economic value of keeping a heifer for breeding over a two-year term. Checked again at this build: it remains in development, with no published rates and no sign-up window. Until rates exist there is no premium to quote, and on the normal product-development timetable the first policies could not run to term before about 2029. Whatever BRAND does, it does to the next cattle cycle, not this one — which is worth saying in a week when Montana rings sold 409 bred heifers at an average of $3,472 a head with no federal program involved at all.

5. Montana Weekly Auction Data

Montana licenses twelve cattle auction markets. This report accounts for all twelve every week, from each barn’s own posted results first and from USDA’s reports where a barn publishes nothing readable. The roster comes before the narrative, because a subset of barns is not the Montana market.

Sale-date window this week: November 3 through November 7, 2026. Barns run different days and some run twice a week, so a week’s roster spans a range of sale dates. Every figure below is dated.

Eight of the twelve markets produced figures this week and four did not. The reasons are specific and not interchangeable: Glendive sold on Friday but had not posted the report when this was built, Ramsay sold twice and its posted reports did not yield readable figures, Glasgow publishes images rather than text, and Bear Paw had no sale in the window and publishes nothing readable in any case. None of those is estimated or smoothed. The accounted head count across the markets that reported totals is 16,555 head, against 17,058 last week — but the two are not strictly comparable, because the mix of which barns totalled their receipts changes week to week.

Montana’s calves came down this week, after three weeks of holding while the futures market fell. Across the four USDA-reported barns, 550-to-599-pound steers brought $418.80 a hundredweight on 315 head, down $3.66 from $422.46 — a 0.9 percent decline. The 600-to-649-pound band brought $400.35 on 508 head, down $5.76 from $406.11 — a 1.4 percent decline. Both bands held above $400. Heavier feeders were softer: 650-to-699-pound steers at $360.21 on 260 head, down $22.54, and 700-to-799-pound steers at $349.86 on 122 head, down $17.14. Note how the decline steepens with weight. The heavy feeder is the animal closest to the fed-cattle market that broke this week, so it reprices first; the light calf is furthest away, and it repriced least.

Receipts were light and there was a reason for it. Miles City sold 1,553 head against 4,561 the week before, and the barn said why: heavy rain across the state left the country too muddy to get cattle to town, cancellations ran high, package sizes were smaller and the buyer pool was much thinner. Lewistown said the same thing more briefly — “the beautiful weekend rain kept traffic a little lighter.” A thin sale with a small crowd is a worse price test than a full one, and it is part of why the spread between barns was wide again.

Heifer calves fell much harder than steers, and that is this week’s most important Montana number. The 550-to-599-pound heifers brought $354.61 on 450 head, down $15.67 or 4.2 percent, and the 600-to-649-pound band $331.17 on 120 head, down $28.86 or 8.0 percent. The gap to steers of the same weight is now $64.19 and $69.18 a hundredweight, against $52.18 and $46.09 last week. Two cautions travel with those figures: the heavy-band heifer sample is only 120 head, and the Billings heifer run this week carried a lot of fleshy and plainer cattle that pull an average down. But a 4 percent fall on 450 head in the light band is not a mix accident. Section 2 widened the heifer bands on it, and did not widen them the whole way, for exactly that reason.

The spread between barns is still the widest thing in this roster and it is still worth money. On the light band Billings Livestock paid $422.97 and Western Livestock at Vaughn averaged $387.33 — a $35.64 a hundredweight spread, which is $205 a head on a 575-pound calf. On the heavy band Billings paid $401.83 against Vaughn’s $366.64, a $35.19 spread worth $211 a head. One caveat that matters: the Vaughn figures pool steers and heifers because the barn reports by lot rather than by class, so part of that gap is mix rather than geography. Even allowing for it, a rancher inside driving distance of two barns should price both, every week, and the barns’ own posted reports are free.

5.1  Why we still print the barn when the specials lead

Most of the money through Montana rings this week was bred females, not calves, and the calf sample in the 600-to-649-pound band was 508 head against 1,007 a week ago. The barn still gets printed in full, because the barn is where culls, bred females, yearlings and local basis actually get discovered. Four USDA-reported barns and four more barn-published reports priced 2,233 bred females, 825 boning cull cows and 67 slaughter bulls this week. No video sale and no futures contract prices any of that.

5.2  Statewide receipts and class mix, one week in arrears

USDA’s Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary covering a week publishes the Monday or Tuesday after it, so the statewide figures below describe the week ending October 31 and not the week in this edition’s headline. Total receipts were 13,685 head, down 0.9 percent from 13,808 the week before and down 17.8 percent from 16,641 a year ago. Feeder cattle were 9,325 head, 68.1 percent of the total; slaughter cattle 2,819 head, 20.6 percent; replacement cattle 1,541 head, 11.3 percent.

USDA put a number on how light this autumn has been. In its own words, receipts have been “very light this fall and consistently 15 to 25 percent less than last year,” with that week’s feeder receipts 25 percent under the same week a year ago and total receipts 18 percent under. The reason USDA gives is grass: “with this year’s late season rains fall pastures have been very good and calves on average have been heavier than historical averages, especially in Eastern Montana.” Ranchers with feed are holding cattle. That is the single most important piece of context for every price in this edition.

The class mix is still heavily tilted to steers. Inside the feeder run, steers were 60 percent, heifers 38 percent and bulls 2 percent. This report’s 96-week two-year average is 49.3 percent steers, 47.6 percent heifers and 2.8 percent bulls. Ten points more steers than normal, for a fifth consecutive week, says ranchers are holding heifers back — and the heifers they do bring are being discounted $64 a hundredweight. Those two facts together are the retention decision happening in public: the heifer is worth more in the pasture, or in a bred-female sale in five weeks’ time, than the calf ring is paying for her.

USDA’s own trend language for that week, which is the market talking. Steer calves 400 to 499 pounds sold mostly $10 higher and 500-to-599-pound calves mostly steady to firm; steers 600 pounds and heavier sold mostly steady to $5 higher. Heifer calves 350 to 499 pounds sold generally steady and heifers 500 pounds and heavier mostly steady to $5 lower. Quality ran from plain to very attractive, cutback cattle off the summer video sales kept showing up, and trucking stayed difficult with trucks very tight. Several buyers filled loads and left early, which widened price spreads again.

The full roster with every market’s own posted results, and this edition’s spreadsheet, are at honestcattle.net/montana-weekly-auction-results.

The translation. Montana cash calves are $78.03 a hundredweight over the November feeder contract — $400.35 against $322.33. A week ago that gap was $68.35. The basis widened another $9.68 even as Montana cash came down, because the futures price fell faster. It is wide, but it is not a record: on this report’s Montana basis series it is the ninth-widest of the 68 weeks since January 2024 in which Montana actually printed a 600-to-649-pound trade. Eight weeks were wider; the widest was $105.83 in the week ending February 28, 2026, and the most recent wider week was May 9 at $104.50. A gap this wide closes one of two ways: the futures price comes up to Montana, or Montana comes down to the futures price. This week Montana took its first real step down, and the cash feeder index fell with it. Section 9 prices what that gap does to the feedlot buying the calf, and Section 21 carries it as the first risk in this edition.

6. Video Auction Results — Seasonal

Correction this week: the video season has not closed. Last week’s edition said the 2026 video and internet sale season was over and that the next broadcast touching Montana cattle was a bred-female sale on December 1. That was wrong, and a rancher weighing a forward sale would have been misled by it. Superior Livestock ran a video sale on November 5 with calf lots in the region that includes Montana, and there are four more calf-lot video sales catalogued before the end of the year. The right statement is that video selling continues through December at much reduced volume.

What Superior’s November 5 sale printed. The sale offered 33,049 head and reported 24,452 sold, a 25.2 percent pass rate — a quarter of the cattle offered did not meet their reserve, which is itself a reading on demand. In the North Central region, 377 head of 600-to-649-pound steers brought $396.54 in a range of $389 to $403, with 252 of those head at $398.68 for current delivery and 80 head of value-added calves at $389.00 for December. Heifers in the same band brought $368.00 on 45 head, which is too thin to read. Heavier cattle: 181 head of 865-to-885-pound steers at $321.99.

Three standing cautions, stated every time. First, these are regional figures, not Montana figures. USDA groups Montana calves into a seven-state North Central region — Colorado, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming — and publishes no state-of-origin breakout. Second, video calves sell forward with a price slide. Superior’s terms that sale ran a 0 to 4 percent pencil shrink with a slide of 0 to 40 cents over 600 pounds and 0 to 50 cents under, current delivery runs to November 19, and the book carries deliveries out to February 2027. The printed price is not a spot Montana cash bid. Third, the bands are thin. Only 6 percent of this sale’s supply came from the North Central region, so a 377-head band is a real number from a small corner of a big sale.

The sale’s own trend language was blunt. USDA reported feeder steers and steer calves $15 to $20 lower than the previous sale and feeder heifers and heifer calves $15 to $25 lower, with demand moderate for steers and light for heifers, and named the cause: “CME futures have experienced a sharp decline over the past week and a half, placing additional downward pressure on the cattle market.” Western Video Market also held a sale on November 6 with no Montana consignments in it — checked, not assumed.

The video calendar through year end, so nobody plans around a closed season again. Superior Livestock on November 19 (catalogue closes November 9, video November 16), Western Video Market at Reno on December 2, Superior on December 3 and again on December 17, and Northern Livestock Video’s Diamond Ring Sale on January 11, 2027. The Sundling & Lane Ranch Female Sale on December 1, carried by Northern Livestock Video, is a bred-female sale rather than a calf sale.

The translation. The regional video print of $396.54 for a 600-to-649-pound steer sits $3.81 a hundredweight below Montana’s own barn print of $400.35 for the same weight — and the video number is a weaned load lot for forward delivery while the barn number is largely unweaned barn-run cattle. Like for like, on this report’s own derivation the weaned load-lot premium runs $40 to $50 a hundredweight. So a forward video price below the spot barn price for plainer cattle says the forward market is discounting the calf hard. A rancher offered a forward contract for spring delivery this week should expect a number well under today’s barn bid, and should price the slide and the shrink before comparing the two. The lag is immediate: forward markets reprice with the futures market, which fell 4.6 percent this week. Cross-link: honestcattle.net/montana-video-cattle-auction-trends.

7. Bred Cattle and Cull Cow Data

This is the section that matters most in November, and this week it earned the billing. The calf run is finishing, the fall bred-female specials opened, and most of the money that changed hands in Montana rings this week was cows rather than calves. Two signals live in here and they are not the same signal. The cull cow market is this month’s cheque. The bred-female market is a forward signal on how many calves Montana will have to sell seven to ten months from now.

7.1  Bred females — the specials opened strong

Montana rings sold 2,233 bred females in five days. 409 bred heifers averaged $3,472 a head in a range of $2,250 to $4,350, and 1,824 bred cows priced per head averaged $2,977, with another 37 ranch-tested cows sold by weight. A week ago the comparable count was about 1,079 head and only four of them were reported as bred heifers. The full sale-by-sale ledger is in Section 2.3; what follows is what it means.

The age and mouth gradient is worth more than the market moved. Young bred cows — coming threes and fours — brought $3,607 on 734 head. Solid-mouth cows five and over brought $2,783 on 269 head. Broken-mouth cows over eight brought $2,354 on 491 head. That is $1,253 a head from the top of the age range to the bottom. The whole feeder futures break this week was worth about $80 a head on a 600-pound calf. Sorting, ageing and presenting cows was worth fifteen times as much.

Presentation inside the same class, on the same Friday, was worth $551 a head. Weaver Ranch’s 92 home-raised, first-cycle bred heifers out of Big Sandy averaged $3,910 and topped at $4,350. The mixed bred-heifer run at Public Auction Yards the same day averaged $3,359, and its plainest Medium-frame sets brought $2,483. Same state, same week, same class. The difference is home-raised cattle, a known breeding date, a sorted draft and a named sale.

What that says about forward calf supply. A rancher pays $3,910 for a bred heifer because he intends to keep her and calve her, which takes a female out of the beef supply for years. The replacement composition at the three USDA-reported barns that sold replacements this week ran 58.2 percent bred cows, 16.4 percent bred heifers, 23.6 percent stock cows and 1.7 percent open heifers on 2,612 replacement head. A combined bred share of 74.6 percent sits just under the 75 percent line this report treats as active retention. Read it carefully, though: the ring composition flips to bred-heavy the moment the specials start, so some of that is the calendar rather than a change in behaviour. The stronger evidence is the price level, and the price level is unambiguous. People are paying up for females they mean to keep.

For the record, USDA’s statewide replacement composition for the week ending October 31 — which predates the specials — ran 65 percent stock cows, 28 percent bred cows, no bred heifers, 6 percent open heifers and 1 percent pairs on 1,541 head. The two pictures are not in conflict; they are one week apart on either side of the start of the bred-female run.

SIDEBAR — REPLACEMENT COMPOSITION -> CULL-COW + FORWARD CALF VALUE
This week: stock cows 23.6% - bred cows 58.2% - bred heifers 16.4%
           (n = 2,612 replacement head, Montana USDA-reported barns, Nov 3-6)
Cull-cow read (current-week):    stock-cow share 23.6%, just under the 25% line.
                                 It is the autumn cull run, not spring open-cow
                                 oversupply. Boning cows $135.08/cwt on 825 head,
                                 -$4.66 on the week. Call: MILDLY BEARISH.
Forward calf read (7-10 months): combined bred share 74.6%, just under the 75%
                                 active-retention line. Price level is the
                                 stronger signal: 409 bred heifers at $3,472/hd.
                                 Call: FIRM, scored conservatively at +$1.50/cwt
                                 (+$9/head) rather than the full +$3-$8 band,
                                 because one week of specials is not a trend.

7.2  Cull cows — the bidding war cooled

Montana boning cull cows brought $135.08 a hundredweight on 825 head at the four USDA-reported barns, down $4.66 from $139.74 — a 3.3 percent decline. On a 1,300-pound cow that is $1,756 a head, $61 less than a week ago. Breaking cows brought $128.42 on 81 head, down $3.35, and lean cows $120.97 on 643 head, down $4.58. Slaughter bulls over 900 pounds went the other way, up $4.25 to $183.33 on 67 head. USDA’s statewide print for the week ending October 31, published this week, had boning cows at $138.16 on 1,165 head.

The reason the cull came down is specific and it is not the packers. For a month this market has been driven by a bidding war between buyers who want cows to feed and packers who want cows to harvest, and the feeding buyers were winning. This week the feeding buyers backed off. Miles City reported feeding cows “mostly $5 to $10 lower on all classes” with “fewer buyers in the stands.” Public Auction Yards reported feeding cows “mostly $3 to $8 lower,” with “American packers and Canadian buyers both” showing lighter demand and private feeders absorbing most of the offering. Slaughter cows, by contrast, sold generally steady at both barns. So the premium that feeding demand had been adding to a Montana cull cow shrank; the packer bid underneath it did not move.

One detail from the packer side worth keeping. Public Auction Yards reported that packer-bought thin and blemished cows were “mostly purchased to hold for the upcoming holiday season.” Packers are buying cheap cows now for ground beef demand in December. The national cutter cow cutout stood at $293.76 on November 6, with 90 percent lean trim at $367.86. That cutout is what a cull cow is worth to a packer once she is broken down, and it is the floor under this market.

The spread inside the cull pen is where the money is. A boning cow at $135.08 against a lean cow at $120.97 is $14.11 a hundredweight, or $183 a head on a 1,300-pound cow. The difference between those two grades is condition — flesh and yield. USDA said it plainly in the statewide report: “the quality and yield of cows destined for immediate harvest is very low as feeding buyers continue to buy cows away from packers.” A thin cow is being bought as a feeding project. A cow with condition on her is being bought as beef, and beef pays $183 a head more.

7.3  Five things to do about it in the next six weeks

1. Get cows mouthed and pregnancy-checked at the yard, not just at home. Over 2,000 cows were pregnancy-checked for Friday’s sale at Public Auction Yards, and cows sold per head on that basis brought $2,731 while ranch-tested cows sold by weight at Miles City worked out to about $2,620. The gap between a mouthed, checked, per-head cow and a ranch-tested cow sold on the scale has run a few hundred dollars a head all autumn. It is the cheapest money in this edition.
2. Sort the broken mouths out and sell them separately. A broken-mouth cow brought $2,354 and a solid-mouth running-age cow $2,783. Mixing them costs the solid-mouth cows more than it gains the broken ones, because a buyer prices a mixed draft off the poorest mouth he can see.
3. If you have heifer calves and feed, the bred-female market is paying you to keep them. A 600-pound heifer calf brought $331.17 this week — about $1,987 a head. A bred heifer brought $3,472. That is roughly $1,485 of gross value for a year of grass, a bull and a pregnancy check, on a heifer the calf ring is currently discounting $69 a hundredweight. It is not free money and it is not for everybody: it ties up a year of feed and carries breeding risk. But the two markets have not been this far apart all autumn.
4. Put condition on the cull cows before they go, or sell them now. A cow with flesh grades boning rather than lean and that is worth $183 a head. If you have cheap standing feed, the next four weeks are a feeding project. If you do not, the cull market just came down $61 a head in a week and the direction is lower, so waiting costs money.
5. Enter the named specials rather than a regular sale day. The three strongest bred-female averages in Montana this autumn were all named sales with catalogues — Weaver at Lewistown, the Fall Female Roundup at Public Auction Yards, and the Vaughn female sale in October. The remaining calendar runs November 10, 13, 20, 21 and 24, then December 1, 4, 8–9, 15, 18 and 19. Consignment deadlines are weeks ahead of sale day; Lewistown asked for Heart of the Herd consignments this week.

The translation. On the cull side, a $4.66 a hundredweight decline is minus $61 a head on a 1,300-pound cow, and with feeding demand cooling the near-term direction is lower. On the forward side, a 74.6 percent bred share and bred heifers at $3,472 is worth about plus $1.50 a hundredweight, plus $9 a head on a 600-pound calf in the seven-to-ten-month delivery window — scored at half the bottom of the range because one week of specials is not a trend. Those two readings point in opposite directions over different horizons, and both are in the signal table in Section 20.

8. Cash Fed Cattle and Basis Context

This is the price the feedlots that buy Montana calves are selling into. Montana is not in the reporting region, so it is not a local price — it is the number that decides what a feedlot can afford to pay for a Montana calf seven months before it sells him.

The week’s print, and then what happened after it. USDA confirmed 61,441 head in the 8-State Region (USDA groups them into five reporting areas — Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Iowa/Minnesota) for the week ending Monday November 2. Steers sold live on a free-on-board basis averaged $223.73 a hundredweight on 21,733 head in a range of $218 to $230; dressed steers delivered averaged $352.19 on 17,082 head; heifers live averaged $224.19 on 10,104 head. That was the week’s settled print and it was a strong one.

One note on that head count, because it is not comparable to earlier weeks. USDA changed this report on October 26: it now includes data from all five reporting areas rather than excluding areas where region-level reporting had to be withheld for confidentiality. The report itself says so. So the 61,441 head cannot be read against the 19,930 printed as “week ago,” and this report will not do the arithmetic as though it could. The prices are unaffected.

Then the current week broke. By Thursday November 5 the daily report had live steers at $215.12 on 6,501 head in a range of $208 to $218, with dressed steers at $334.24. Friday’s trade was moderate at 6,958 head, live cattle at $208 to $215 and dressed steers at $325 to $330. Formula cattle — sold on a pre-agreed pricing grid rather than negotiated — moved 24,900 head at an average 959-pound carcass for $358.63. A DTN livestock analyst summarised the week plainly: Southern live cattle traded at mostly $218, “which is $6 lower than last week’s weighted average,” and Northern dressed cattle at mostly $340, “$8 to $25 lower than the previous week’s weighted average.” Week-to-date volume through Thursday was 52,456 head against 49,775 a week earlier, so the cattle moved — they just moved cheaper.

For the record, the four ways fed cattle get priced. In the national weekly report covering October 26 to November 2, negotiated purchases averaged $223.88 live and $351.99 dressed; formula net purchases $231.79 and $365.52; forward contract net purchases $234.86 and $370.78; negotiated grid net purchases $232.83 and $352.94. Negotiated cattle — the ones that set the published cash price — came in under the other three. A rancher should know that the price everybody quotes sits under the other three prices packers actually pay.

The basis that matters to Montana. Montana’s 600-to-649-pound steers at $400.35 sit $78.03 a hundredweight over the November feeder contract at $322.33, the ninth-widest of the 68 weeks since January 2024 in which Montana printed that trade. Against the cash feeder index at $337.41 the Montana calf is $62.94 over — though that index is built on 700-to-899-pound feeders, so it is not a like-for-like animal and the gap partly reflects weight rather than location.

The other basis flipped, and that is the week’s structural change. For most of the autumn cash fed cattle traded above the futures price and pulled the market up. The December contract settled at $214.05 against a negotiated cash print of $223.73 for the week ending November 2 — cash still $9.68 over. But this week’s trade at $208 to $218 sits right on the futures price. The cash support under the futures market is gone. That is the mechanism by which a fed-cattle break reaches a Montana calf.

The translation. A $6.00 a hundredweight decline in the fed-cattle weighted average is a 2.7 percent move. Run it through the leverage in Section 3 — every 10 percent on fed cattle is worth about 14.3 percent on calf value — and it implies about minus $15 a hundredweight and minus $92 a head on a 600-pound Montana calf over a four-to-eight-week window, if it sticks. Montana gave up $5.76 a hundredweight this week, which is well under that. Either the fed market comes back or Montana has more to give. Section 9 shows what the break does to the feedlot that has to bid on the calf.

9. Feedlot Profitability Using Today’s Montana Calf Prices

This section asks one question every week: if a feedlot buys a Montana feeder steer at this week’s actual Montana auction price and feeds him to finish, does the arithmetic work? We use the real purchase price from this week’s USDA-reported Montana barns — never an estimate and never last week’s figure.

The animal. Montana 700-to-799-pound steers brought $349.86 a hundredweight across 122 head at the USDA-reported Montana barns that sold November 3 to 6. That is the placement steer, priced at the band’s midpoint weight of 750 pounds. Fed to 1,350 pounds, he has 600 pounds of gain to put on.

The arithmetic, laid out.

The loss narrowed by $41 a head, and the reason is the most encouraging thing in this edition. Against the April 2027 live cattle contract at $219.85 — roughly when this steer finishes — the margin is minus $12.84 a hundredweight, which is minus $173 a head. A week ago the same calculation showed minus $214. Against the nearer December contract at $214.05 the loss is $18.64 a hundredweight, $252 a head.

Where the $41 came from, in order of size. Montana’s heavy feeder got cheaper: $349.86 against $367.00 a week ago, down $17.14 a hundredweight, which on a 750-pound purchase is plus $129 a head of saving to the buyer. The April contract fell $6.78 a hundredweight, which on a 1,350-pound steer is minus $91 a head. Cheaper corn gave back about plus $4 a head. Read the first item carefully, because it cuts both ways: the feedlot’s arithmetic improved because Montana sold its heavy feeders $129 a head cheaper. That is the chain working, and the cost of it landed on a Montana rancher.

Why a $173 loss still matters more than the improvement does. A feedlot with empty pens and fixed costs still has to buy cattle, and every feedlot in the country is bidding for a share of the smallest calf crop in seventy-five years. When this number was minus $109 a head in September the bid held up anyway. What a negative paper margin does is remove the feedlot’s willingness to chase, and it does it with a lag — the pens being filled this week were budgeted a month ago. The effect shows up in the bid three to six weeks out, not immediately. The honest read of two weeks’ data is that the feedlot is restoring its margin by paying less for feeders rather than by getting more for fed cattle, and a rancher still holding calves is on the paying end of that.

Montana basis widened again, and the argument over how it closes is now settled by one week of evidence. Montana 600-to-649-pound steers at $400.35 sit $78.03 over the November feeder contract at $322.33, against $68.35 a week ago. It widened $9.68 even though Montana cash came down, because the futures price fell faster. On the side of the futures price rising to meet Montana: record-low September placements, corn down 16 percent in five weeks, slaughter running 6.2 percent under a year ago, and a cowherd at a 75-year low. On the side of Montana coming down: a feedlot paper margin still at minus $173 a head, fed cash trading $6 to $8 lower, the quality premium in the beef cutout collapsing 42 percent, a fund long in feeders still crowded at the 79th percentile of eleven years, and — new this week — the cash feeder index itself falling about $14 to $337.41. Last week this report said Montana cash was disagreeing with the futures market. This week Montana’s calf price came down 1.4 percent and the index came down 4 percent. The disagreement is being settled the way the futures market said it would be, and that is why Section 20 cuts sentiment again.

10. Boxed Beef Cutout and Packer Economics

The cutout is what a packer gets for the beef off one carcass, quoted per hundredweight. It is the top of the chain: everything a Montana rancher is paid flows down from it.

Choice beef came down and Select did not move. For the week ending November 6, the Choice cutout averaged $363.02 a hundredweight, down $5.49 from $368.51 — a 1.5 percent decline. Select averaged $355.17, up 11 cents from $355.06. Friday’s daily print had Choice at $360.79, down 77 cents, and Select at $353.56, up $1.24, on 116 loads. The week moved 548 loads in total.

The premium for quality collapsed, and that is this section’s headline. The Choice-over-Select spread fell to $7.85 a hundredweight from $13.47 — down $5.62, or 42 percent, in one week. The four-week average is $14.05, so this is a sharp break from a stable level rather than a drift. This report treats $8 as the line above which retailers are bidding for quality and below $5 as the point where beef is being bought as an undifferentiated commodity. At $7.85 the spread sits below the $8 line. Section 12.1’s twelve-month table carries it at $3.80 in May 2026 and $1.59 in April, so the premium was thinner than this twice inside the past twelve months.

Where in the carcass it happened. Choice primal rib averaged $676.84 and Select rib $628.72, a $48.12 gap — the rib is where Choice earns its premium and it is still earning it. Choice loin $437.83 against Select $411.82. But look at the middle of the carcass: Choice chuck $318.79 against Select chuck $325.90, and Choice round $288.97 against Select round $291.72. In the chuck and the round, Select beef is worth more than Choice this week. Those are the grinding and roasting cuts, and demand there is for lean yield rather than marbling. That is the whole quality-premium story in two lines.

The packer’s gross margin went the other way and widened. Take the Choice cutout at $363.02 for the week ending November 6 against fed cattle sold dressed at $352.19 for the week ending November 2 — the two weeks are one apart and labelled as such. That is a gross margin of $10.83 a hundredweight of carcass, against $7.73 a week ago. On a 900-pound carcass it is about $97 a head gross, before labour, energy and everything else. The packer bought cattle $6 to $8 cheaper and sold beef $5.49 cheaper, so the packer kept the difference.

SIDEBAR — CHOICE-SELECT SPREAD -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week: $7.85/cwt (vs $13.47 prior week, $14.05 4-week avg)
Per $1/cwt move:  $0.65-$0.85/cwt on 600-lb calf - $4-$5/head verified-program
Direction this week: bearish for verified-quality calf bids
Lag:  5-9 months

SIDEBAR — PACKER GROSS MARGIN -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week: $10.83/cwt (Choice cutout $363.02 wk ending 11/06 less fed dressed
           $352.19 wk ending 11/02 - the two weeks are one apart and labelled)
Change from prior week: +$3.10/cwt
Per $1/cwt expansion: +$0.20-$0.40/cwt - +$1.20-$2.40/head on 600-lb calf
Direction this week: mildly bullish
Lag: 2-4 weeks

10.1  Grass-fed beef — who is buying, in Montana

This sub-section carries a standing requirement: either it names a channel a Montana rancher can actually sell grass-finished cattle into, with its terms, or it says plainly that none was found. A retail premium a rancher cannot reach is trivia dressed up as a market signal.

Still no open buyer taking Montana grass-finished cattle from other ranchers at a published price — but this week the search turned up the routes that do exist, and they are worth naming. All of them require buying in rather than selling in.

Old Salt Co-op, based at Helena, was formed in spring 2021 by several ranch families and markets its members’ beef under one label. It is rancher-owned, and a new ranch joins as a member rather than selling cattle to it; a couple of ranches have been added since it started. It publishes no cattle price. Glacier Processing Cooperative near Columbia Falls runs about 1,500 head a year and is building to 3,000 to 4,000; membership is $7,000 for one share and buys a discounted kill rate and guaranteed hook space, and it has 45 members. Montana Premium Processing Co-op at Havre has 70 members at $5,000 a membership and is processing about 20 head a week, with labour the stated constraint. Both were started with Montana Farmers Union help.

Add those up and you have the honest answer. A few thousand head a year of cooperative processing capacity, against a Montana calf crop in the region of 1.5 million head. The channel is real, it is member-owned rather than open, and it is processor-constrained rather than demand-constrained. A rancher who wants into it buys a membership and waits for hook space. That is a genuine route for a handful of outfits and it is not a market a commercial cow-calf operation can sell its calf crop into this autumn.

And be careful with the retail premium, because it is not one number. In this week’s national retail survey, grass-fed and antibiotic-free ground beef at 80 to 89 percent lean averaged $11.23 a pound in 1,607 stores against $6.27 for the conventional item in 5,303 stores — a 79 percent premium. On 90-percent-lean ground beef the premium was 36 percent, $10.24 against $7.54. On boneless ribeye it was 10 percent, $16.88 against $15.38. And on stew meat the grass-fed item was cheaper: $7.55 against $8.57 conventional. Anyone quoting a single grass-fed premium is averaging those four numbers into something that does not exist. The premium is in ground beef, it is thin and scattered elsewhere, and none of it reaches a Montana rancher without a named buyer.

10.2  Grocery-store action

What the grocers are doing with beef tells you what the consumer is doing, three to six weeks before it reaches the cutout. Retailers pushed beef hard into the holiday. In the ad period running October 31 to November 12, the Activity Index — USDA’s measure of how much advertised beef is in front of shoppers — rose 5.4 percent to 111,004, against 83,398 a year ago, a 33 percent increase. The Feature Rate, the share of surveyed stores running a beef feature at all, rose to 91.6 percent from 88.1, with 25,521 outlets surveyed.

But watch where the ad space went. Compared with the previous week, items from the brisket, chuck, sirloin, ground and variety-meat sections lost ad space, while loin, rib, round, other and deli gained it. Retailers moved promotion into the rib and the loin — the expensive end — in the week the quality premium in the cutout collapsed. That is a retailer feature calendar built around Thanksgiving roasts rather than a read on everyday demand, and it is why the next three weeks of cutout prints will be hard to interpret. The thing to watch is what happens to the chuck and ground sections after November 26.

The translation. Heavy feature activity supports the cutout two to four weeks out, which is worth about plus $1 to plus $2 a hundredweight, $6 to $12 a head on a 600-pound calf through the packer margin. Against that, the collapse in the quality premium is worth minus $4.22 a hundredweight, minus $25 a head on verified-quality calves over five to nine months. The near-term read is mildly positive and the forward read is clearly negative.

11. Cattle Slaughter and Packer Margins

Slaughter fell again and it is running well under a year ago. For the week ending November 7, federally inspected cattle slaughter was estimated at 534,000 head, down 1.7 percent from 543,000 the week before and down 6.2 percent from 569,000 a year ago. Beef production was 479.8 million pounds, down 1.5 percent on the week and 5.0 percent on the year. Friday’s kill was estimated at 96,000 head and Saturday’s at 11,000.

The year-to-date figure is the durable one. Cattle slaughter for 2026 stands at 23,274,000 head against 25,046,000 last year — 1,772,000 fewer cattle killed, a 7.1 percent decline. Year-over-year weekly comparisons swing around on the calendar; a 7.1 percent shortfall across forty-five weeks does not. That is the single most reliable bullish fact in this report.

Carcasses are heavier, which gives back part of it. Average live weight for the week was estimated at 1,469 pounds against 1,454 a year ago, and dressed weight 900 pounds against 890. Heavier carcasses mean 6.2 percent fewer cattle produce only 5.0 percent less beef. The comprehensive report for the week before showed steer dressed weights at 991 pounds, down 3 pounds, and a decline in quality grading — which is some evidence that the North is finally working through its backlog of heavy cattle. That matters for the quality premium in Section 10.

The heifer share of the kill is the number to watch, and it keeps falling. In the week ending October 24, steers were 52.1 percent of the cattle killed, heifers 28.6 percent, cows 17.8 percent and bulls 1.5 percent. A year earlier heifers were 31.9 percent. Heifers are 3.3 percentage points less of the kill than a year ago. Every heifer not killed is a heifer kept, and a heifer kept is a calf in 2028 rather than beef in 2026. Section 7’s bred-female prices are the same fact seen from the other end.

Packers are making money and have been since July. The gross margin in Section 10 is $10.83 a hundredweight of carcass, about $97 a head before costs, against $7.73 a week ago. An industry commentator put it this way: the weekly slaughter “continues to reflect improving plant utilization, which translates into better margins for the processors,” and processors “have maintained profitability since July — the longest period during the past few years.” A profitable packer running full shifts is a packer that keeps bidding on cattle, which is good for the feedlot and eventually for the calf.

Capacity, carried as a watch item. Tyson closed its Joslin, Illinois beef plant in August and is pursuing a sale of its Pasco, Washington plant. Pasco is the Pacific Northwest’s principal fed-cattle and cull cow outlet and a standing destination for Montana fed cattle and cull cows. No buyer has been announced and no further decision has been published. If the sale fails and Pasco closes, Pacific Northwest basis widens and Montana freight runs east to Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado — a real cost on Montana fed sales and a loss of bid competition on cull cows. The thing to watch is who buys Pasco and whether it keeps killing cattle.

Placements are the forward story and they have not changed. September placements into feedlots were 1,777,000 head, 88 percent of a year ago — a 12 percent decline, below the lowest industry estimate and the smallest September in a series that starts in 1996. Those cattle were due to reach the packer between February and June 2027. Nothing that happened on the futures market this week changes the number of cattle that went into feedlots in September. The next Cattle on Feed report is November 20.

SIDEBAR — SLAUGHTER + PLACEMENTS -> MONTANA CALF BID
Slaughter this week:  534,000 head (change YoY: -6.2%; YTD -7.1%)
Latest monthly placements: 1,777,000 head (change YoY: -12.0%, lowest Sept on record)
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)
Combined direction this week: bullish
Note: both coefficients are linear by construction and must not be read literally
      at a 6 percent or 12 percent move. Section 20 scores the slaughter line off
      the 7.1 percent year-to-date trend rather than this one week's -6.2 percent,
      and caps the placement line. A disciplined read, not the raw arithmetic.

The translation. Scored off the year-to-date trend rather than this single week, the slaughter pace is worth about plus $3.00 a hundredweight, plus $18 a head on a 600-pound calf over four to eight weeks. September’s placement decline is worth about plus $5.50 a hundredweight, plus $33 a head in the five-to-nine-month window, capped well below the raw arithmetic. Together this is the most bullish page in the edition, and it is the reason sentiment was cut half a point rather than a full one.

12. Packer Grid Pricing and Implications for Calf Prices

A packer does not pay one price for a fed steer. He pays a base price and then adds and subtracts on a grid: premiums for Prime and for Certified Angus Beef, a smaller premium for Choice, a discount for Select, discounts for Yield Grade 4 and 5, and discounts for carcasses that are too heavy or too light. The grid is how beef quality turns into money, and the Choice-over-Select spread is the single number that drives most of it.

The worked example, on this week’s numbers. The Choice-over-Select spread is $7.85 a hundredweight. On a 900-pound carcass that is $70.65 a head of grid premium captured by a Choice carcass over a Select one. At the 70 percent pass-through this report uses, the feedlot keeps about $49.46 a head of that, which on a 750-pound placement steer is $6.59 a hundredweight of extra break-even tolerance — room to bid more for the calf. Carried down to the calf, the verified-quality portion of the premium is worth about $5.89 a hundredweight, or $35 a head, on a 600-pound calf.

A week ago those same numbers were $121.23 a head of grid premium and $61 a head on the calf. The collapse in the spread took $26 a head off the quality premium embedded in a Montana calf bid in five days. The flow-through lag is five to nine months, so this does not hit Monday’s bid; it hits the bid on cattle placed now and sold next summer.

Read the lag honestly, in both directions. The spread was above $20 a hundredweight through August, September and the first half of October. Cattle placed in those weeks have not finished yet, so that wider spread will still be supporting bids on verified-quality cattle into next spring. This week’s collapse affects cattle that finish in the middle of 2027. A rancher selling documented, verified-Choice-and-better calves this autumn is being paid off the old spread, not the new one. That is worth knowing before anybody panics about $7.85.

12.1  Twelve months of the quality premium

One row a month, taken from a mid-month week. Rows from April 2026 onward are first-party: either this report’s own published figure for that week, primary at the time of publication, or USDA’s weekly report parsed in that week’s build. Rows before April 2026 are Honest Cattle’s standing reference series and were not re-verified this week. The measurement basis is stated on every row, because editions through mid-July quoted a single daily close and editions from late July on quote the weekly average, and mixing the two is exactly the error this report had to correct in September.

What the table shows. The spread ran at $20 to $23 a hundredweight from August through October, after a thin spring when it was down at $1.59 in April and $3.80 in May. This November row at $7.85 puts the premium back into the lower half of its own twelve-month range. The useful reading is not the level but the speed: the spread has lost $15.21 a hundredweight since the August row, which is about $137 a head of grid premium on a 900-pound carcass.

SIDEBAR — CHOICE-SELECT SPREAD -> MONTANA CALF BID
This week: $7.85/cwt (vs $13.47 prior week, $14.05 4-week avg)
Per $1/cwt move:  $0.65-$0.85/cwt on 600-lb calf - $4-$5/head verified-program
Direction this week: bearish for verified-quality calf bids
Lag:  5-9 months

The translation, and a caveat on who it applies to. The $5.62 fall in the spread is worth about minus $4.22 a hundredweight and minus $25 a head on a 600-pound verified-program calf over five to nine months. Commodity calves with no documented health or genetic programme see roughly 30 percent of that, about $7 a head. This report’s standing estimate for the reputation premium a Montana outfit earns for documented weaning, vaccination and genetics is 6 to 12 cents a pound, and at $4 calves more likely 10 to 18 cents a pound — 2.5 to 3.5 percent of value, or $60 to $108 a head on a 600-pound calf. That premium is now larger than the whole grid-based quality premium the beef market is paying, which is an odd place for the market to be. It means buyers are paying for predictability and health rather than for marbling, and that kind of premium is more durable than one driven by a cutout spread.

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

USDA tracks how much of every dollar shoppers spend on beef makes it back to the ranch. That figure is the rancher’s share of the retail beef dollar, and this section leads with it because it is the cleanest single measure of whether the rancher is getting his cut of a strong beef market.

The rancher’s share was 49.3 percent in September 2026. That is a net farm value of 490.7 cents a pound against a Choice beef retail value of 994.4 cents a pound. The all-fresh retail beef value was 946.8 cents. USDA last updated this series on October 14 and publishes October’s figure on November 10, so nothing in it changed this week; the figures above were checked again this week against USDA’s own published file.

The Price Transmission Index is plus 3.5 points. The index is simply the current share minus the five-year average, which is 45.8 percent across 2021 to 2025. At 49.3 percent the rancher’s share is 3.5 points above its five-year average. On this report’s colour-coded scale — red below 43.8 percent, yellow 43.8 to 45.8, green above 45.8 — that is GREEN. A rancher is getting a better-than-normal cut of the retail dollar.

But the trend is the warning, and it has three parts. Month on month the share slipped from 49.4 percent in August to 49.3 in September — essentially flat. Year on year it fell from 54.6 percent in September 2025 to 49.3 percent, a 5.3-point decline. And the share has come down every month but one since May, when it was 55.6 percent. The level is still green. The direction has been one way for four months.

Where the lost share went, and it is not the grocer. USDA splits the retail dollar three ways. The rancher’s share went 51.1 percent in July, 49.4 in August, 49.3 in September. The grocer’s share — the wholesale-to-retail spread — went 46.8, then 45.0, then 43.5 percent: the grocer lost ground too. The packer’s share — the farm-to-wholesale spread — went 2.0 percent in July, 5.6 percent in August, 7.1 percent in September. The packer’s slice of the retail beef dollar more than tripled in two months while both the rancher’s and the grocer’s shrank. Section 10’s widening packer gross margin is the same fact measured a different way, and Section 11’s note that packers have been profitable since July is the third sighting of it.

SIDEBAR — PTI -> MONTANA CALF BID
Rancher share this month: 49.3% (September 2026; 5-yr avg 45.8%)
PTI: +3.5pp
Direction: bullish on level, bearish on trend (-5.3pp year over year)
Per 1pp negative PTI: -$0.50 to -$1.00/cwt - -$3 to -$6/head on 600-lb calf
Read symmetrically and conservatively on the positive side: +$1.50/cwt
Lag: 4-8 weeks

The translation. A positive index is a tailwind, and this report scores it conservatively rather than symmetrically: plus $1.50 a hundredweight, plus $9 a head on a 600-pound Montana calf over four to eight weeks, against the minus $0.50 to minus $1.00 a hundredweight per point this report would apply on the negative side. The reason for the asymmetry is that a high rancher share tends to attract more cattle to market and correct itself, while a low one grinds on. If October’s figure drops below 45.8 percent when USDA publishes on November 10, the index turns yellow and this line flips. The live tile is at honestcattle.net/montana-cattle-markets-2.

14. Regional Weather Summary

This is a statewide read, and it names which part of the drought map changed this week. It is not a county forecast. County-level snowpack, soil moisture, drought readings and the seven-day National Weather Service outlook live on each county page at honestcattle.net and update themselves; this section covers the state.

A mild, dry, quiet week after a wet one. The rain that cut sale receipts at Miles City and Lewistown fell over the weekend of November 1 and 2 and the state has been drying out since. The south-central Montana reference point used in this report runs 36 degrees overnight, 56 on Monday, 53 on Tuesday, 58 on Veterans Day and 60 on Thursday, mostly cloudy early in the week turning sunny, with little wind and no precipitation of consequence in the seven-day outlook. For a rancher that is a straightforward week: good hauling weather, cows still grazing, no stress on cattle and no mud.

The week’s featured mover is the severe-drought band, and it is the only category that moved. On the November 3 map, released November 5, the share of Montana in severe drought or worse fell to 9.09 percent from 11.36 percent — a 2.27-point improvement in one week. Meanwhile the abnormally dry share and the drought-free share did not move at all, holding at 36.60 and 63.40 percent, and the extreme-drought share barely moved, from 4.93 to 4.84 percent. All of this week’s improvement happened inside the severe band: ground that was in severe drought moved up to moderate, and nothing moved at either end of the scale. That is what late-season rain on already-improving country does — it lifts the middle and leaves the driest ground where it was.

Why the quiet week matters more than usual. USDA named grass as the reason Montana receipts have run 15 to 25 percent under last year all autumn: late-season rain made fall pasture very good, calves are heavier than historical averages, and ranchers are holding cattle. A mild, dry week in the second week of November extends that. Every week cows stay out is a week of hay not fed, and Section 17 puts a number on it.

The translation. Mild weather and standing feed keep cattle off the market, which supports the calf bid by restricting supply — worth perhaps plus $1 to plus $3 a hundredweight, $6 to $18 a head on a 600-pound calf over two to four weeks, and it is the reason Montana cash has fallen so much less than the futures market. The risk sits on the other side of it: cattle held back are cattle that still have to sell. A hard change in the weather turns a supportive supply story into a bunched-up run of cattle inside a fortnight. Section 21 carries that as a named risk. For your own county, see honestcattle.net/counties-in-montana-counties.

15. Moisture, Snowpack, Range — See County Page

Montana’s Drought Severity and Coverage Index is a single number from 0 to 500 that combines how much of the state is in drought with how bad it is. Zero means no drought anywhere. It is the cleanest one-figure read on range conditions there is.

The index fell to 69 from 72 on the November 3 map. Eight weeks ago, on September 8, it was 156. That is an 87-point improvement in eight weeks, and it ranks 55th of the 1,393 rolling eight-week windows in Montana since 2000 — the top four percent of the record, a very good autumn, and not a record. The largest of those 1,393 windows was 173 points in mid-2022. Three months ago the index stood at 146 and a year ago at 155, so Montana’s drought index is less than half what it was a year ago.

The category detail, which is where the honesty lives. As of November 3: 63.40 percent of the state is drought-free, 36.60 percent abnormally dry or worse, 18.64 percent in moderate drought or worse, 9.09 percent in severe drought or worse, 4.84 percent in extreme drought, and none in exceptional drought. A year ago, 53.44 percent of the state was in moderate drought or worse and 32.06 percent in severe drought or worse against 9.09 percent now. Those are the Drought Monitor’s own published figures.

And here is the part that cuts the other way. Three months ago, on August 4, the extreme-drought share of Montana was zero. It is now 4.84 percent and has barely moved in two months. The state got dramatically better in aggregate while a corner of it got worse and then stuck. An estimated 71,850 Montanans live in the drought-affected area. A rancher inside that 4.84 percent has had no autumn recovery at all, and a statewide index of 69 tells him nothing useful about his own grass.

Snowpack is early and the right place to read it is your own county page. This report does not publish county snowpack tables or county drought readouts; they live on the auto-updating county pages, which carry the current snow-water equivalent against the ten-year range, soil moisture, the Drought Monitor reading and the seven-day forecast for your county. Park County’s ten-year snowpack history, for context on how a Montana water-year normally builds, is at honestcattle.net/ten-year-history-of-snowpack-in-park-county-montana.

The translation. A drought index at 69 against 155 a year ago means a Montana cow herd goes into winter in better shape, on more standing feed, with a lower hay bill, than it did last year. That supports retention — and retention is what Section 7’s bred-female prices are measuring. The forward effect on the calf bid is real but slow: more cows kept this winter means more calves in late 2027 and 2028, which is bearish for calf prices in that window and bullish for bred-female prices now. Nearer term it is supportive, because grass holds cattle off the market. Call it plus $1 to plus $3 a hundredweight near term and a forward supply headwind two years out that nobody selling a calf this autumn needs to price.

16. Range Forage Outlook and Feeder Marketing Implications

Montana has its grass back. The drought index is less than half last year’s, fall pasture is good enough that USDA named it as the reason state receipts are running 15 to 25 percent under last year, and the hay report says ranchers “plan on leaving cows turned out and off hay as long as possible.” That is the backdrop. What follows is what the range signal changes about marketing decisions in the next six weeks, with dollars attached.

The signal in one sentence: standing feed has given a Montana rancher time, in a week when the market took away price. Those two facts pull in opposite directions and the decisions below are about which one wins for your outfit.

1. Every extra week cows stay on grass instead of hay is worth about $12 to $16 a cow. Good alfalfa is $230 a ton. A dry cow eating 30 pounds of hay a day eats 0.015 tons, which is $3.45 a day, or $24 a week — and standing fall grass is not free either, so call the net saving $12 to $16 a week per cow after the grazing value you are using up. On 200 cows that is $2,400 to $3,200 a week. This is the single largest dollar item on this page and it requires no market call at all.
2. Documented weaning and vaccination is worth $60 to $108 a head and it just got more valuable, not less. This report’s standing estimate for the reputation premium on documented health protocol and genetics is 6 to 12 cents a pound, and at $4 calves more likely 10 to 18 cents — 2.5 to 3.5 percent of value. The grid-based quality premium in the beef market collapsed 42 percent this week to $7.85 a hundredweight, worth about $35 a head on a calf. The protocol premium is now larger than the grid premium, which means buyers are paying for health and predictability rather than for marbling. That kind of premium does not evaporate when a cutout spread does.
3. If you have heifer calves and feed, the bred-female market is paying you about $1,485 a head to keep them. A 600-pound heifer calf brought $331.17 this week, about $1,987 a head, with the heifer discount at $69 a hundredweight. Montana rings paid an average of $3,472 for a bred heifer this week across 409 head. The gross difference is roughly $1,485 for a year of grass, a bull and a pregnancy check. Net of a year’s feed at this hay price, breeding cost and a realistic open rate, a good share of that survives. It is not for everybody — it ties up a year and carries breeding risk — but with grass in hand the arithmetic works.
4. Sort the cull cows now and sell the lean ones first. Boning cows at $135.08 a hundredweight against lean cows at $120.97 is $14.11 a hundredweight, $183 a head on a 1,300-pound cow. Feeding demand for cows cooled this week — feeding cows sold $3 to $10 lower at the barns while slaughter cows held steady — so the premium for a thin cow bought as a feeding project is shrinking. A thin cow sold this month gets the fading feeder bid; a cow with condition gets the packer bid, which did not move.
5. If you are holding calves to background them, price the gain before you price the market. Backgrounding a 600-pound calf to 800 pounds over about 100 days at 2 pounds a day, on roughly 12 pounds of $230-a-ton hay plus grain and yardage, pencils near 97 cents a pound of gain — about $193 for 200 pounds. Today’s Montana 700-to-799-pound print is $349.86, so the added weight is worth about $397 of gross against $193 of cost. But the futures market is pricing March feeders $8.48 a hundredweight under November, and this report’s own forward curve is flat. The gain pays; the price will not. Do it because the cost of gain is cheap, not because you expect a higher market.

The translation. Three of those five decisions — grazing days, protocol documentation and cull sorting — are worth $12 to $183 a head and do not depend on this forecast being right about anything. The two that do depend on a price view, retaining heifers and backgrounding calves, are both being paid for by the cost side rather than by the price side. In a week when the calf market came down 1.4 percent and the futures market came down 4.6 percent, that is the right place to be looking.

17. Hay Prices

Hay is the largest purchased winter-feed cost on most Montana cow-calf outfits, and it moves cow cost and cost of gain independently of the cattle market.

No new hay report landed this week. The USDA Montana Direct Hay Report runs weekly to bi-weekly, and the most recent print is Friday October 30, covering the week ending October 30 — the same report that was current in last week’s edition. The next one is due around November 13. The figures below are dated October 30 and are not restated as current-week prices.

Prices as of October 30, free on board, per ton. Good alfalfa in large rounds $230.00 on 50 tons. Fair alfalfa in large rounds $200.00 on 125 tons, and Fair alfalfa in 3-by-4 large squares $200.00 on another 125 tons. Premium timothy grass in small squares $360.00 on 50 tons. Barley straw in rounds $50 to $70, weighted average $60, on 200 tons. Hay sold generally steady against the October 16 report, with demand moderate and supplies moderate. No Premium or Utility alfalfa grade was reported, and this report does not interpolate a grade USDA did not print.

The volume is the real story in that report and it is a bullish one for a cow-calf outfit. Confirmed hay trade was 350 tons against 2,360 tons in the prior report and 2,250 tons a year ago — down 85 percent. Straw was 200 tons against 400. USDA explains it directly: “Fall rains have been very beneficial to pasture and range conditions as many ranchers report plentiful supplies of fall grass and feed for cows which are turned out. This has lightened demand for hay as most ranchers plan on leaving cows turned out and off hay as long as possible.” Montana is not buying hay because Montana does not need hay yet.

Geography is worth more than grade right now. Northern Montana hay sits at a discount to southern Montana hay, because northern sellers compete with hay coming out of Canada and across Highway 2 from North Dakota. Canadian hay is being offered delivered into northern and central Montana at $160 to $200 a ton against $230 for Good alfalfa free on board in the south. And the Fred Robinson Bridge near Hilger has reopened, so hay bought earlier in the fall on the Hi-Line is now moving south. A rancher on the northern tier can buy feed $30 to $70 a ton cheaper than one in the south, and freight from stack to ranch is the reason the two markets do not converge.

Cow-cost translation. At $230 a ton for Good alfalfa, a dry cow eating 30 pounds a day over a 120-day feeding period eats 1.8 tons and costs $414 a cow wintered. On Fair alfalfa at $200 that is $360. On Canadian hay delivered north at $180 it is $324. The assumptions are stated because they are what the answer turns on: change the feeding period to 150 days and the Good-alfalfa figure becomes $518 a cow. Every week cows stay out instead cuts about $24 off that number.

Cost-of-gain translation. Backgrounding a 600-pound calf at 2 pounds of gain a day on about 12 pounds of $230-a-ton hay plus grain and yardage pencils near 97 cents a pound of gain. If hay were $280 instead, the same ration runs about $1.03 — so a $50-a-ton move in hay is worth roughly 6 cents a pound of gain, or $12 on 200 pounds. That is the sensitivity a rancher should carry into the retention decision in Section 16.

The calf-bid consequence. Steady-to-easier hay with collapsed trade volume and good standing feed is friendly to a Montana calf price, because it means ranchers are not forced to wean and ship to cut a feed bill. It is worth perhaps plus $1 to plus $2 a hundredweight, $6 to $12 a head on a 600-pound calf over four to eight weeks, through supply rather than through demand. The same fact tightens hay demand later: cows that stay out until December still need feeding in January, and the drought linkage in Sections 14 and 15 agrees — a state at a drought index of 69 against 155 a year ago is a state that will feed less hay, not more.

18. New World Screwworm Status

The New World screwworm is a fly whose larvae feed on living tissue. It was eradicated from the United States in 1966 and has been moving north through Central America and Mexico since 2023. It matters to a Montana rancher for two reasons: an outbreak that reaches cattle country means treating and inspecting every animal with an open wound, and the response to it closes and opens the border that Mexican feeder cattle come through.

No new state and no new port decision this week. USDA’s status page was last modified November 4, 2026, and the three most recent items on it all predate this week: Arizona’s first confirmed detection on October 28, a dog in Cochise County; Texas modifying its infested zone on October 23; and the first detection in United States wildlife, a Pecos County elk, on October 21. Arizona remains the third state with a confirmed detection, after Texas and New Mexico.

The running total, with the usual caution about who is counting. Trade reporting this week put United States cases as approaching 100. USDA’s own dashboard is the primary count and the trade trackers do not reconcile with each other, so this report gives the range rather than picking a number. In Mexico, the case list carried 554 entries with the most recent dated November 5, updated each business day.

The border schedule is unchanged and it is the part with a price on it. From USDA’s status page: Douglas, Arizona opened to cattle imports August 24; Santa Teresa, New Mexico September 24; Columbus, New Mexico October 26; and Nogales, Arizona remains scheduled for November 30. Santa Teresa also reopened to horse imports on October 26, with quarantine required on the United States side because the Mexican-side facilities remain closed. USDA says it will keep assessing additional ports on animal-health risk, operational readiness and the continued effectiveness of mitigation.

The volumes have ramped hard, and this is where last week’s figure was wrong. USDA’s weekly import summary for the week ending November 6 shows 14,700 head of Mexican feeder cattle crossing in one week — 7,550 through Douglas, 6,100 through Santa Teresa and 1,050 through Columbus, with 3,200 head on Friday alone. Last week’s edition used “about 3,700 head a week,” which was a fourteen-week average across the reopening rather than the current rate. Section 19 rebuilds the calf-bid translation on the right number.

What those cattle are worth at the border. Mexican steers crossing at Douglas sold free on board at $405 to $430 for 400-to-500-pound calves, $370 to $390 for 500-to-600, $330 to $345 for 600-to-700-pound and $300 to $315 for 700-to-800. Spayed heifers ran $340 to $350 at 500 to 600 pounds. Those quotations fell $15 to $20 a hundredweight from a week earlier, and by Friday there was not enough current trade at either Douglas or Santa Teresa to establish a quote at all, with USDA noting a lower undertone. A Mexican 600-to-700-pound steer at $330 to $345 against a Montana 600-to-649-pound steer at $400.35 is a $55 to $70 a hundredweight gap, and the two animals do not go to the same feedyards.

The uncomfortable fact in these paragraphs sitting next to each other. Cases spread west into a third state in the same weeks the border is opening at about one port a month, and the crossing volume has quadrupled in a month. USDA’s position is that the mitigation is working and the phased opening is risk-managed. A rancher is entitled to notice that the detection map and the opening schedule are moving in opposite directions, and that the Arizona case is in the county next door to the Douglas port that opened in August. This report is not going to pretend those are unrelated, and it is not going to claim a causal link it cannot show.

The translation to a Montana calf bid. Two channels, pulling opposite ways. At 14,700 head a week, imported Mexican feeders are about 2.9 percent of a national weekly feeder supply of roughly 500,000 head, four times the rate this report was carrying. Direct competition on that basis is worth about minus $2 to minus $4 a hundredweight, minus $12 to minus $24 a head on a 600-pound Montana calf, and Nogales on November 30 adds to it. The honest qualifier is that Mexican cattle are lighter and land mostly in Southwest feedyards rather than in the Northern Plains yards that buy Montana calves, so the competition is indirect. Against all of it, an outbreak reaching United States cattle country at scale would shut the border hard and tighten feeder supply sharply — bullish for a Montana calf and catastrophic for the industry, and not a trade anyone should want. The lag on the import channel is two to six weeks from a port opening to cattle arriving in a feedyard. The watch items are Nogales on November 30 and whether Arizona’s single case stays single.

19. Import, Tariff and Policy Landscape

Policy is context until it moves a number. This section sorts what landed by whether it has a mechanism and a dollar figure or only a press release and a deadline, and gives space accordingly. Nothing new landed this week, so this is short on purpose — but one carried figure was wrong and is corrected.

Correction this week: the import ledger. This report has been carrying imported Mexican feeder cattle at about 3,700 head a week. That was a fourteen-week average taken across the border’s phased reopening and it was used as though it described the current week. USDA’s weekly import summary for the week ending November 6 shows 14,700 head. The right figure is roughly four times what this report was printing, and the calf-bid translation below is rebuilt on it. The direction of the error matters: it understated a headwind rather than overstating one.

The origin-labelling review deadline is now about three and a half weeks out. The executive order signed September 4, 2026 gave the Secretary of Agriculture 90 days — roughly December 3, 2026 — to review every statutory and regulatory authority that may permit mandatory country-of-origin labelling for beef, and to deliver a summary of those authorities and an economic analysis to the White House. Say the next part plainly, because the headlines do not: the order does not implement origin labelling. It orders a study of whether it is legally possible and then permits, but does not require, action. Congress repealed mandatory origin labelling for beef in 2015 after World Trade Organization rulings authorised Canada and Mexico to retaliate against roughly a billion dollars of United States goods. Whether existing authority is enough to reinstate it without Congress is genuinely contested, and this report does not adopt either reading as its own legal conclusion. The durable fact for a rancher is a date to watch. Label transparency and origin disclosure are the whole subject of Farm Animal Transparency (FAT — farmanimaltransparency.com), and this is the closest overlap between that work and this forecast.

Beef exports weakened and there is a port problem behind part of it. United States beef export net sales were 11,000 metric tons for the week, unchanged from the week before but 29 percent below the four-week average. Shipments were better at 13,400 tons. China recorded a net reduction of 600 tons; South Korea and Japan remained the leading buyers. Separately, the labour contract at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports — through which roughly a quarter of United States beef exports move — was temporarily extended past its November 6 expiry while negotiations continue. A DTN analyst named that uncertainty as one reason the live cattle market struggled this week. Weak exports and a port risk both push beef back into the domestic market, which is bearish for the cutout.

Packers and Stockyards enforcement — directional only. The second September 4 order directs USDA to prioritise Packers and Stockyards Act investigations, add enforcement resources and staffing, coordinate with the Justice Department and report on a one-year plan. More investigations and more staff is a stated priority, not a rule. Enforcement promises on packer concentration have been made repeatedly across administrations of both parties with little measurable change in the cash market. The things to watch are the one-year plan and actual case filings, not the announcement. Section 13’s finding that the packer’s share of the retail beef dollar more than tripled between July and September is the number any enforcement effort would have to move.

One line each on the small money. The fourth round of the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program is $60 million — real, and small against the roughly 5,000 head a day of harvest capacity the largest packers have closed or put at risk this year. Increased federal purchasing of American beef, expanded disaster recovery, and added resources for beginning and veteran ranchers are each announced and each unquantified at the Montana level. The Emergency Conservation Program is usable on Grassland CRP acres after wildfire and other disasters, which is a genuine tool for the 4.84 percent of Montana still in extreme drought. The proposed BRAND heifer-retention endorsement is priced and assessed in the LRP Corner at Section 4.6; it remains in development with no published rates.

The translation to a Montana calf bid. The import channel is now worth roughly minus $2 to minus $4 a hundredweight, minus $12 to minus $24 a head on a 600-pound calf, four times the headwind this report was carrying, with the effect landing harder on cull cows than on calves because imported lean beef and domestic cull-cow beef compete for the same grinding demand. Weak exports add perhaps another minus $1 a hundredweight through the cutout. The origin-labelling review has no calculable near-term calf effect and this report will not invent one — a study with a December deadline moves no number in November. Packers and Stockyards enforcement is likewise zero until a case is filed. The two items on this page that could move a Montana price inside a quarter are the Nogales port opening on November 30 and the West Coast port labour talks.

20. Sentiment Score

Sentiment is cut to 6.0 out of 10, from 6.5. Ten is euphoric and one is despair. Six is constructive with real cracks in it. This is the second consecutive cut and the score has come down a full point in two weeks, from 7.0.

Why it came down. Four things, in order of weight. One: the feeder cattle futures market fell a second consecutive 4 percent and the nearest contract is down $25.45 a hundredweight in two weeks. Two: fed cattle cash broke $6 to $8 a hundredweight, and the cash premium that had been pulling the futures market up all autumn has closed. Three: the Choice-over-Select premium collapsed 42 percent in one week to $7.85, below the $8 line where quality stops being paid for, and in the chuck and the round Select beef is now worth more than Choice. Four: Montana cash finally gave ground — 600-to-649-pound steers down 1.4 percent, heifers down 8 percent, cull cows down 3.3 percent, and the cash feeder index down about $14 to $337.41. For three weeks this report wrote that Montana was refusing to follow the futures market down. This week it started to.

Why it was cut only half a point. Six things pull the other way. Slaughter is running 7.1 percent under a year ago on the year to date, 1,772,000 fewer cattle. September placements were the lowest on record for the month and are still in front of the market. Corn is down 16 percent in five weeks. The feedlot’s paper loss narrowed $41 a head. The heifer share of the kill is 3.3 points lower than a year ago. And Montana rings sold 2,233 bred females with bred heifers averaging $3,472 a head, 409 head against 116 in the mid-October composite, and retention is the mechanism by which the calf market gets paid in 2027 and 2028.

The Price Transmission Index is a required input and here is its contribution. The rancher’s share of the retail beef dollar was 49.3 percent in September against a five-year average of 45.8, so the index is plus 3.5 points — green on level. Its contribution to this score is positive, and it is the single reason the score did not go below 6.0. But the trend inside it is negative: 55.6 percent in May, 51.1 in July, 49.4 in August, 49.3 in September, and 54.6 percent a year ago. USDA publishes October on November 10, and if it prints below 45.8 the index turns yellow and this input flips sign.

20.1  The net calf-bid signal table

NET CALF-BID SIGNAL — $/cwt and $/head on 600-lb Montana calf
Choice-Select spread:    -$4.22/cwt    -$25/head    (5-9 mo lag)
Slaughter pace:          +$3.00/cwt    +$18/head    (4-8 wk lag, scored off YTD)
Monthly placements:      +$5.50/cwt    +$33/head    (5-9 mo lag, capped)
Feeder/corn + PGM:       +$0.27/cwt     +$2/head    (1-4 wk lag)
Stock vs bred share:     +$1.50/cwt     +$9/head    (7-10 mo, half the low band)
PTI:                     +$1.50/cwt     +$9/head    (4-8 wk lag)
NET (near-term, <=4 wk):   +$3.27/cwt    +$20/head
NET (mid-term, 4-12 wk):   +$4.77/cwt    +$29/head
NET (forward, 5-9 mo):     +$2.78/cwt    +$17/head

The table is positive on all three horizons and the score was cut anyway. That needs explaining, and the explanation is a limitation in the table rather than a fudge in the score. The five signifiers this table aggregates are the quality premium, the slaughter and placement pace, the feed ratio and packer margin, the replacement composition and the rancher's share. None of them is the fed-cattle price and none of them is the feeder futures price. This week those two were the whole story: the nearest feeder contract lost $15.45 a hundredweight, which on a 600-pound calf is about $80 a head of forward value, and fed cash lost $6 to $8. The table scores a falling feeder price only indirectly, as a 2.4-point fall in the feed ratio worth 66 cents a hundredweight, and it scores the resulting improvement in the packer's margin as a positive — which is true for the packer and not true for the rancher.

So read the table as what it is: a read on the structural signals, not on the price. The structure is friendly. There are not enough cattle, the kill is small, placements were a record low and ranchers are keeping females. The price is what moved, and it moved down twice in two weeks with the cash market now following. Sentiment at 6.0 reconciles those by saying: the structure still argues for a strong 2027, and the next four to six weeks are going to be worse than the structure implies. This report is going to add a fed-cattle-price line to this table, because a signal table that cannot see the week's main event is incomplete, and saying so is better than scoring around it.

What would move the score. Up: fed cattle trading back above $220 live for a full week, or the Choice-Select spread recovering above $12. Down to 5.5: Montana's 600-to-649-pound steers printing under $385, or the fund long in feeders unwinding hard, or the November 20 Cattle on Feed report showing placements back near a year ago.

21. Risks and Watch Items for the Week Ahead

1. Montana cash converging the rest of the way down to the futures price. Worth $90 to $150 a head. Montana's 600-to-649-pound steers sit $78.03 over the November feeder contract, the ninth-widest of 68 comparable weeks since January 2024. This week Montana came down 1.4 percent while the futures market came down 4.6 percent, so the gap got wider, not narrower. If Montana closes even half of that $78 over the next month it is $39 a hundredweight, about $234 a head. This report's judgement is that the realistic exposure over four to six weeks is $15 to $25 a hundredweight, $90 to $150 a head. That is the first risk on this list.
2. The crowded fund long in feeder cattle unwinding. Worth $30 to $60 a head. The funds are net long 13,597 feeder contracts, bigger than in 489 of the 617 weeks since 2015, and they cut that position by only 597 contracts in a week when the price fell 4.6 percent. The selling that drove this week was other people. If the funds start to leave the way they partly did in live cattle — down 6,882 contracts — it is worth minus $5 to minus $10 a hundredweight over two to six weeks.
3. The November 20 Cattle on Feed report. Two-sided, worth $20 to $50 a head. October placements are the number. September's were 88 percent of a year ago and the smallest September in USDA's series, which begins in 1996. If October comes in near a year ago, the tight-supply argument holding this market up loses the main piece of evidence behind it. If it comes in under 90 percent again, it is the single most likely source of a bounce. A DTN analyst named this report and strong fed cash as the two things that could turn the trend.
4. A hard change in the weather bunching up the cattle that have been held back. Worth $10 to $30 a head. USDA says Montana receipts are running 15 to 25 percent under last year because fall grass is good and ranchers are holding cattle. Those cattle still have to sell. A storm or a hard freeze inside the next three weeks turns a supportive supply story into a crowded run of calves into barns that already have thin buyer pools — Miles City had 1,553 head and a much smaller crowd this week after one wet weekend.
5. The West Coast port labour talks. Worth $5 to $15 a head. Roughly a quarter of United States beef exports move through Los Angeles and Long Beach and the labour contract was extended past November 6 rather than settled. Beef export net sales are already 29 percent below their four-week average. A stoppage pushes beef back into the domestic market and into the cutout.
6. Nogales opening to Mexican cattle on November 30, on top of a crossing rate that has quadrupled. 14,700 head crossed in the week ending November 6. A fourth port adds to it. Worth minus $2 to minus $4 a hundredweight on the feeder market generally, with the caveat in Section 18 that these are lighter cattle going mostly to Southwest yards.
7. The opportunity rather than the risk: the bred-female specials. Eleven named Montana sales remain between November 10 and December 19. The first week of the run paid $3,910 for home-raised first-cycle bred heifers and $3,810 for sorted coming-three and coming-four bred cows. A rancher with females to sell is looking at the one market on this page that went up, and consignment deadlines run weeks ahead of sale day.

Two things to watch on the calendar. USDA publishes October's rancher-share figures on November 10, which will show whether the Price Transmission Index stays green. The Cattle on Feed report lands November 20. The Montana Direct Hay Report is due around November 13.

22. Sources

Every figure in this edition comes from one of the sources below, with its report name and date. Where a figure is this report's own calculation or assumption it is labelled as such in the section that uses it.

USDA Agricultural Marketing Service

• Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary (AMS_1778), week ending October 31, 2026, published November 2, 2026.
• Miles City Livestock Commission Auction (AMS_1773), sale of November 3, 2026, final.
• Public Auction Yards Livestock Cattle Auction, Billings, Wednesday (AMS_1774), sale of November 4, 2026, final.
• Billings Livestock Commission Cattle Auction, Thursday (AMS_1777), sale of November 5, 2026, final.
• Public Auction Yards Livestock Cattle Auction, Billings, Friday (AMS_1776), sale of November 6, 2026, final.
• Superior Livestock Video/Internet Auction (AMS_2713), sale of November 5, 2026, final, reported November 6, 2026.
• National Weekly Boxed Beef Cutout and Boxed Beef Cuts — Negotiated Sales (AMS_2461 / LM_XB459), November 6, 2026.
• National Daily Boxed Beef Cutout and Boxed Beef Cuts — Negotiated Sales, Afternoon (AMS_2453 / LM_XB403), November 6, 2026.
• National 5-Day Rolling Cutter Cow Cutout and Boxed Cow Beef Cuts (LM_XB404), November 6, 2026.
• 5 Area Weekly Weighted Average Direct Slaughter Cattle (AMS_2477 / LM_CT150), week ending Monday November 2, 2026, published November 3, 2026.
• 5 Area Daily Weighted Average Direct Slaughter Cattle — Negotiated (AMS_2466 / LM_CT100), recap for Thursday November 5, 2026.
• Estimated Weekly Meat Production Under Federal Inspection (SJ_LS712), week ending November 7, 2026, published November 6, 2026.
• Montana Direct Hay Report (AMS_2769), week ending October 30, 2026, published October 30, 2026.
• Weekly Grocery Store Beef Feature Activity (AMS_3228), advertised prices for the period October 31 to November 12, 2026, published November 6, 2026.
• Mexico to United States Feeder Cattle Import Summary (AMS_3486), week ending November 6, 2026, final.
• Cattle on Feed, released October 23, 2026 (September placements, marketings and on-feed inventory).

USDA Economic Research Service

• Meat Price Spreads — Choice beef values and spreads and the all-fresh retail value; and Summary of retail prices and price spreads. Series last updated October 14, 2026, carrying data through September 2026; next update November 10, 2026.

USDA Risk Management Agency

• Livestock Risk Protection daily rates, Montana feeder cattle, crop year 2027, sales effective date November 6, 2026.
• Ranchers First initiative announcements of August 31 and September 4, 2026, including the proposed BRAND endorsement (in development; no published rates).

USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service

• Current Status of New World Screwworm, page last modified November 4, 2026, including port reopening dates and the United States and Mexico detection dashboards.

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service

• Monthly prices received, United States: cattle calves, cattle steers and heifers 500 pounds and over, and corn grain — the regression base for the feed-cost pass-through check, data through September 2026.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission

• Disaggregated Commitments of Traders, futures only, released Friday November 6, 2026, positions as of Tuesday November 3, 2026 — feeder cattle, live cattle and corn.

U.S. Drought Monitor

• Montana state drought statistics, map released Thursday November 5, 2026, data valid November 3, 2026; author Brad Pugh, Climate Prediction Center / NOAA. Comparative readings for October 27, 2026, August 4, 2026 and November 4, 2025 from the same published table.

NOAA National Weather Service

• Gridpoint forecast, south-central Montana reference point, retrieved November 8, 2026.

Montana auction markets — the barns' own posted results

• Lewistown Livestock Auction, market reports of November 3, 2026 and the Weaver Ranch Annual Bred Female Sale of November 6, 2026, with commentary by Kyle Shobe.
• Dillon Livestock Auction, Special Bred Cow and All Class Cattle Sale report, November 5, 2026.
• Western Livestock Auction, Vaughn, posted lot results for November 4 and November 7, 2026.
• Headwaters Livestock Auction, Three Forks, market summary for the Red Angus / Hereford Influence Special Feeder Sale of November 4, 2026.
• Sidney Livestock Market Center, market reports of November 4 and November 7, 2026.
• Glendive Livestock Exchange, upcoming sales and latest posted report (October 30, 2026).
• Glasgow Stockyards, Montana Livestock Co. at Ramsay and Bear Paw Livestock at Chinook — sale calendars and consignment listings checked; see Section 5 for why no figures were available from each.

Futures prices

• Settlement prices for Friday November 6, 2026, read from published quote pages: feeder cattle November 2026 and January, March, April, May, August, September and October 2027; live cattle December 2026 and February and April 2027; corn December 2026 and March 2027. Eight of those contracts are also independently computed legs of this report's own index forward curve and all eight agree to within a cent.
• CME Feeder Cattle Index, value for November 5, 2026, and contract-level volume and open interest for November 6, 2026, from the same published quote pages. The index is a CME Group product and is what the feeder cattle contract settles against.

Trade and market commentary

• Western Livestock Journal, "Market Wrap-Up: Friday, Nov. 6" (November 6, 2026) and "Cattle markets struggle amid uncertainty" (November 5, 2026), both reporting midday commentary by ShayLe Stewart of DTN and notes from The Cattle Report.
• The Cattle Site weekly protein report, November 6, 2026, for United States beef export net sales and shipments and for Mexican border cattle quotations.
• Tri-State Livestock News, "Co-op model expands livestock processing in Montana," April 3, 2026, for Glacier Processing Cooperative and Montana Premium Processing Co-op membership terms and throughput. Old Salt Co-op's own published account of its formation and membership, retrieved November 8, 2026.

Honest Cattle's own series and calculations

• Honest Cattle Market Index, version 2.2, week ending November 7, 2026, provisional; methodology at honestcattle.net/2026/06/23/montana-cattle-index.
• Montana basis series, 140 weekly observations back to January 2024, of which 68 carry an uncarried 600-to-649-pound cash leg and are usable for ranking.
• Front-month corn weekly closes, 525 weeks, rolled continuous series.
• Montana Drought Severity and Coverage Index, every weekly map since January 2000, 1,402 observations.
• Choice and Select cutout history, mined from this report's own published editions and from USDA's weekly report each week since; basis recorded per row.
• Frozen forecast vintages, 17 editions from July 6, 2026, used for the look-back scorecard; never edited after publication.
• Commitments of Traders history, 617 weeks from January 2015, used for the positioning percentiles.
• Feed-cost pass-through, method from the Montana State University Agricultural Marketing Policy Center (John Marsh), coefficients re-estimated by Honest Cattle on national USDA monthly data from 2000 to September 2026.
• Executive orders of September 4, 2026 on supporting America's ranchers and on fair competition in livestock markets, as published by the White House.

23. Comparison to Prior Week

Every headline figure in this edition against the same figure in the edition of November 2, 2026. The one-line version: the paper market fell again, the cash fed-cattle market broke, Montana's calves finally gave ground, and the bred-female market opened at prices the calf market cannot touch.

The four things worth carrying out of that table. First, every weight class of Montana steer came down and the decline steepened with weight — 0.9 percent on the light calf, 4.7 percent on the 700-weight. The heavy feeder sits next to the fed-cattle market that broke, so it repriced first. Second, heifer calves fell four to eight percent against steers down one, and the discount is now $64 and $69 a hundredweight. Third, every bred-female class went up on a sample ten to a hundred times larger than last week's. Fourth, the near-term signal table turned positive in the same week sentiment was cut, and Section 20 explains why that is a gap in the table rather than a contradiction in the call.