Hear about MLA's new indicator that launched at Beef

Steve Bignell from Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) joined APlus News at Beef 2024 to talk about its new indicator the National Young Cattle Indicator (NYCI), which was launched on Monday. 

APlus News: Steve Bignell, you're the NLRS manager for MLA. You've just launched a new indicator, the NYCI. What is it?  

Steve Bignell: Yeah, so today at 8.30am we launched the National Young Cattle Indicator. It went live, and it's our new restocker only indicator that captures cattle that are sold both, online and in physical sales and looks at animals over 200kg and gives a national footprint for what's happening in the restocker space. 

The ECYI only looks at physical saleyards and it includes, processors, restockers and feedlots. The EYCI is an aggregation of a whole lot of different buyers. What we're trying to do with the NYCI is give producers target information about the segment and the category of animal they're trying to buy. 

So, producers can look at just what's happening in the restocker market. If they want to look at feeder steer, feeder prices, they can look at the feeder steer price or they can look at the heavy steer price for finished animals. But we're trying to get producers to target the specific animal that they're selling so that the price reflected in the indicator is more of a reflection of what they're going to receive. 

APlus News: So I'm a producer, how should I be using this indicator in my business?  

If you're selling animals into the restocker market, then this should be your main indicator that you use. We're trying to move people from the EYCI to the NYCI and the EYCI to the feeder steer if they're selling them to the feeder market. 

This will really be the main indicator for those cow calf operators that are selling young cattle into the restocker market.  

APlus News: And for the wider supply chain, how will it work for them?  

The same for them. The EYCI was created over 20 years ago. It's in carcass weight, it was you know, the basis for a potential futures product and it was at a time when saleyards were making up a bigger proportion of transactions and processors were more active. 

The market has changed, so the NYCI is the first big rebrand of young cattle indicators in 20 years and it's really targeting that restocker space for people that sell both online and offline. And what it is, it's a national footprint. So we saw in 2020, people were buying cattle from all over the country for restocking purposes. 

The EYCI and WYCI are restricted to specific locations and geographies. This is a national footprint, so that's how our stakeholders should use it.   

APlus News: What else have you got in the supply chain at the MLA in terms of research? 

So, what we have got is we've got our producer intention survey, where we survey nearly 4,000 producers three times a year to understand their intentions, what they're looking to do in terms of bull purchases, when they're looking to sell, what breeds they're investing in, what's sort of driving their decisions, and we've got a wave of that survey out at the moment. The results will come back late May, so we'll have something then for you.