Utilizing Conditional Probabilities In Developing Price Expectations For Selecting Optimal Marketing Alternatives For Fixed Resource Cow/Calf Operators In The Texas Panhandle

The beef cattle enterprises for most of the 91% of producers in Texas with less than 100 cows represent secondary or supplemental enterprises utilizing discretionary labor and fixed physical resources. The decision making process is transformed from a variable resource allocation problem to a fixed resource problem. Reliable price and revenue expectation models are critical to selecting marketing alternatives that maximize the return to the fixed resource allocation. Price expectation models using expected values, price and revenue indexes, and conditional probabilities are developed using monthly average prices for 300-900 lb stocker steers at Amarillo, TX from 1992 to 2002.