DBA Invesco DB Agriculture Fund

More than 90% of the world’s population eats meat in one form or another... and a looming meat crisis threatens to affect what we buy & eat. Brazil, US & China are the world’s three biggest beef producers, together supplying more than half of the world’s beef... but their cattle herds are shrinking at the same time. Brazil’s total herd this year is est'd at 177.4M cattle — a nearly -8% drop from 192.5M in 2024. USDA counted 86.2M cattle & calves on farms on Jan 1, 2026. The number of beef cows — the females needed to produce future calves — was 27.6M, down -1% y/y. The 2025 calf crop was also down -2% y/y to 33.1M. In China, cattle head count dropped to 94M in Jan 2026, down -10.5% from ~105M in Jan 2024. In all 3 cases, beef production is also projected to be down in FY26. Brazil counts China & the EU as 2 major markets for its beef exports. But both have imposed import restrictions—such as EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) compliance hurdles & China’s anti-dumping investigations—that have disincentivised Brazilian beef manufacturers. That is partly responsible for the country’s decreased cattle head count. Additionally, Brazil is currently in what is known as a cattle retention cycle — when rearers reduce the slaughter of animals and instead try to preserve their female stock to help rebuild their herd. In the US, severe droughts have hit major cattle-rearing regions — with grazing areas decreasing, pasture conditions deteriorating, and feed costs rising. In the US, the meat industry depends heavily on immigrant workers — 3 major orgs, representing breeders in the states of Texas, Oklahoma & Kansas, issued a joint statement this week arguing that ICE raids were disrupting their already strained operations. Cattle production is constrained by biological supply cycles — it takes 2 to 3 years from breeding decision to slaughter for an expanded herd to yield market-ready beef. The quickest way to rebuild a herd is to keep female cattle that might otherwise have been sold and use them for breeding. That is what Brazil is now doing. But that creates a difficult economic calculation. A producer can sell an animal today at historical record high prices, or keep it for breeding and wait for the next generation. That means carrying the ongoing costs and feed risks of keeping the animal while waiting for it to reproduce. The result is a structural supply squeeze in which strong demand & limited supply can persist even when prices are already high. This structural shortage creates a massive price spillover effect across alternative proteins. As beef prices surge to record highs, consumer demand shifts rapidly toward cheaper alternatives like poultry, pork, and plant-based substitutes. Poultry has problems too — as India shows — in June, a large section of India’s poultry industry announced plans to cut production by -25% after soya meal prices rose by more than +40% in a month. Producers also began culling parent breeder stocks — birds needed to produce future generations of poultry. Simultaneously, global poultry supply faces ongoing pressure from widespread Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreaks, leading to mass depopulations across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. When feed & operational prices rise sharply, poultry producers face a choice: absorb higher costs, raise prices, or reduce the number of birds they produce. The confluence of biological lag times, environmental shocks, labor shortages, and rising feed input costs points to sustained food inflation across global protein supply chains into FY27 $DBA $MCD $QSR $PBJ $WMT

$DBA Daily. Soft commodity basket ETF breaking falling channel consolidation higher. Overall uptrend. Wheat, soybeans two to watch in particular