It is due to a shift in US consumers, with greater demand for lower cost beef items, which has pushed the price of beef cattle down over the past several weeks.

According to World Agriculture Outlook Board chairman Gerry Bange, the positive for the US industry is that exports are improving.

The US has essentially been playing catch up as far as beef exports are concerned since December 2003 when many countries banned beef from the US after a case of BSE was detected.

"We are seeing somewhat of a recovery in the Korean market, things are moving along," Mr Bange says.

"We're also seeing somewhat of a recovery in the Japanese market."

Those two countries were major buyers of US beef prior to 2003, and the absence of US product has been a boon for Australian sales.

The deal to reopen the Korean market to US beef earlier this year was met with widespread protesting that temporarily stopped the deal from being implemented.

However, the furore has died down and just three short months later US beef accounts for nearly 50pc of the total value of Korean meat imports.

Mr Bange is forecasting that US beef exports in 2009 will top two billion pounds, which is up almost 10pc from this year.

However, the US still has a way to go to reach pre-BSE export levels.

"It's not a bad number compared to where we had been in the recent past," Mr Bange says.

"But it pales in comparison to the 2.5 billion pounds that we recorded back in 2003."