Lorcan Roche Kelly
Business editor, Irish Farmers Journal · Former farmer
“There are too few cattle and too much demand.”
“the cattle are in the U.S. is the lowest it's been in 75 years, actually.”
“Tyson results were out there the other day. They lost $150 million in three months processing beef... the problem is there are not enough cattle to be killed.”
“the world is drowning wheat. It is swimming in milk. We have so much food out there. One thing we're short of is beef.”
“they're brought in this piece of legislation that's called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Lovely acronym is CBAM because it hits you really hard. But we knew the 1st of January 2026, this CBAM tax was coming and it was going to put up to €120 per ton on urea coming in urea's nitrogen fertiliser.”
“December was the biggest number, 60 or 80% higher than normally would be. So it's been a hugely beneficial tax in the very short term.”
“this is not a crisis that's going away, this is a crisis that's delayed. And that's what we're seeing all the way through it.”
“people are eating a lot less... But what they are doing is they're tanking up on protein... you turn it into wpi, which is high protein whey, and then you sell that to anyone making any food in the world... because they can sell it for 25, 30% more.”
“In order to get whey, you produce cheese. Thirty years ago, we produced loads of cheese and the whey was what we fed to the pigs... Now we produce whey and the cheese is what. We don't know what to do with this.”
“Everyone's making soft cheese now because you can turn soft cheese on the market very quickly. The price for cheese has collapsed and it's going to get lower, but you're not going to be able to get an aged cheese because no one's going to... tie the capital up for six months or 12 months on this market.”
“the dollar is 20% weaker than it was a year and a bit ago... it's the FX rate that's done more damage I think than [tariffs] because it has led to uneven demand.”
Lorcan Roche Kelly
One-line summary: Business editor at the Irish Farmers Journal and former farmer; tracked for agricultural-commodity mechanism articulation (cattle-cycle beef squeeze, CBAM fertilizer deferral, GLP-1 cheese-glut).
What they're known for
Business editor at the Irish Farmers Journal and a former practicing farmer himself; a former Bloomberg colleague of the Odd Lots hosts. His value is ground-level agricultural-supply-chain mechanism, translating farm economics (planting decisions, breeding cycles, fertilizer purchasing, cut-of-meat arbitrage) into market-relevant chains.
Why they matter to stock-market
In the May 2026 Odd Lots live show he articulated three agricultural-commodity chains the project tracks: (1) the cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze — 75-year-low US herd, processors losing money (so the trade is upstream, not in processors); (2) cbam-to-fertilizer-price-deferral — the EU CBAM tax drove a Nov/Dec 2025 European pre-buying boom that cushions now but defers the fertilizer crisis to H2 2026; and (3) glp1-protein-demand-to-cheese-glut — GLP-1/protein demand inverting dairy economics toward whey, gluttng cheese. His broad frame: "this is not a crisis that's going away, this is a crisis that's delayed" — the planting/breeding decisions deferred today produce squeezes in 6-12 months. Also flagged the weak dollar (-20%) as more damaging to EU exporters than US tariffs.
Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze:
"There are too few cattle and too much demand." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze:
"the cattle are in the U.S. is the lowest it's been in 75 years, actually." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze:
"Tyson results were out there the other day. They lost $150 million in three months processing beef... the problem is there are not enough cattle to be killed." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze:
"the world is drowning wheat. It is swimming in milk. We have so much food out there. One thing we're short of is beef." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cbam-to-fertilizer-price-deferral:
"they're brought in this piece of legislation that's called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Lovely acronym is CBAM because it hits you really hard. But we knew the 1st of January 2026, this CBAM tax was coming and it was going to put up to €120 per ton on urea coming in urea's nitrogen fertiliser." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cbam-to-fertilizer-price-deferral:
"December was the biggest number, 60 or 80% higher than normally would be. So it's been a hugely beneficial tax in the very short term." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On cbam-to-fertilizer-price-deferral, el-nino-2026-commodity-impact:
"this is not a crisis that's going away, this is a crisis that's delayed. And that's what we're seeing all the way through it." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On glp1-protein-demand-to-cheese-glut:
"people are eating a lot less... But what they are doing is they're tanking up on protein... you turn it into wpi, which is high protein whey, and then you sell that to anyone making any food in the world... because they can sell it for 25, 30% more." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On glp1-protein-demand-to-cheese-glut:
"In order to get whey, you produce cheese. Thirty years ago, we produced loads of cheese and the whey was what we fed to the pigs... Now we produce whey and the cheese is what. We don't know what to do with this." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
On glp1-protein-demand-to-cheese-glut:
"Everyone's making soft cheese now because you can turn soft cheese on the market very quickly. The price for cheese has collapsed and it's going to get lower, but you're not going to be able to get an aged cheese because no one's going to... tie the capital up for six months or 12 months on this market." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
-
"the dollar is 20% weaker than it was a year and a bit ago... it's the FX rate that's done more damage I think than [tariffs] because it has led to uneven demand." — 2026-05-18-odd-lots-why-the-price-of-oil-beef-electricity-and (2026-05-18)
Sources
Related
- cattle-cycle-beef-supply-squeeze — his beef-shortage diagnosis
- cbam-to-fertilizer-price-deferral — his CBAM fertilizer-deferral chain
- glp1-protein-demand-to-cheese-glut — his dairy/whey/cheese chain
- el-nino-2026-commodity-impact — the broader ag-cascade backdrop
- javier-blas — co-guest on the same episode