John Nalivka

John Nalivka is the president of Sterling Marketing, Inc., which provides economic research and market advisory services to the livestock and meat industries. He became affiliated with Sterling in 1991 as executive vice president and he has owned the company since 1994. Nalivka serves clients across the red meat supply chain from producers to end-users.

Latest Stories
Is the Biden Administration’s plan for the beef industry workable, or does it ignore the economics of market structure and pricing across the meat industry supply chain?
With 2022 nearly upon us, and bringing the prospect of a solid cattle market and profits to cow-calf producers not realized since 2015, now is a good time for ranchers to rethink their business in terms of time frame.
Changes in the beef supply chain in recent years have had an increasingly greater market impact. Pricing cattle off the cutout would provide a negotiating a formula that captures a relevant share of the total value.
As the marketing year winds down, Sterling Marketing president John Nalivka provides an overview of his market outlook for 2022 and beyond.
Cattlemen considering making the leap into ownership of a packing plant should consider how their risk profile dramatically changes with labor, trucking, and the cost of building and retaining markets.
We are rapidly approaching the point where we may soon be discussing the cattle cycle in terms of GHGs rather than forage supplies and producer profits.
Does the beef industry have enough packer capacity? With repeated bottlenecks and a worker shortage, a better question might be, “can the industry better use the capacity it has?”
In the haste to go after packers in order to gain producer trust, the government may be using consumer price inflation as a means for greater leverage against packers, suggests John Nalivka.
Presume for a moment that all of this optimism turns out to be wrong and market performance does not deliver as analysts forecast. How will this affect your business going forward?
The outlook for cattle prices and higher returns to cattlemen is looking positive for 2022. Low prices and significant cost inflation significantly impacted cow-calf producer decisions toward herd numbers.