THE PROTEIN PULSE — DRIVE TIME

Closing Bell Friday | September 18, 2026

HOST: Protein Pulse Drive Time. Closing Bell Friday, September eighteenth. From The Sparks Group.

SHAWN: Pick your screen and you can tell yourself a different beef story. Cash cattle holding two twenty-two to two twenty-three. October live cattle just lost two eighty. Packers making money. Feedlots still more than three hundred underwater. Fresh fifties jumped eighteen percent in a day. Cattle on Feed is later today. Everything around it is already under tension.

HOST: Pre-report: one oh one point eight on feed, ninety-seven point three placements, ninety-six point two marketings.

SHAWN: Choice slipped. Fifties printed a dollar oh two seventy-one on good demand and light offerings. South American nineties still around three oh eight to three twenty East Coast. Santa Teresa is expected to reopen September twenty-fourth. Peel puts one hundred fifty thousand Mexican head by year-end, maybe two fifty. Tyson is concentrating around Dakota City, Holcomb, and Amarillo. The herd is rebuilding slowly. The system is already adapting.

HOST: Pork still profitable. Iowa State August farrow-to-finish plus twenty sixty-three — down sixty-one percent from a year ago. Feed costs highest of twenty twenty-six. Chicken still adding birds. Crude still above one hundred.

SHAWN: The shortage is not new. What changed this week is how clearly the industry is adapting to it. Stay disciplined.

HOST: Protein Pulse Drive Time. Shawn Sparks, The Sparks Group.

SHAWN: Stay disciplined.