The Impact of Information Technologies on the US Beef Industry's Supply Chain

Abstract

Historically, the growth of the beef industry has been hampered by the various entities (breeders, cow-calf producers, stockers, backgrounders) within the beef industry’s supply chain. The primary obstacles to growth are the large number of participants in the upstream partners and the lack of coordination between them. Over the last decade significant advances have been made in information technologies. Many new companies have been founded to promote these technical advances. This research looks at the upstream participants, primarily the buyer agencies and principles between the cow-calf producers and the meat packing companies, to determine the degree to which information technologies are currently being utilized and the degree to which these new technologies have driven improvements within the beef industry’s supply chain. We find through our survey that, by and large, the beef industry does not use information technologies to their benefit and that the U.S. beef supply chain is not yet strategically poised to enable the use of these technologies.