Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Christina Mcglone - Deutsche Bank Securities.
Christina Mcglone - Deutsche Bank Securities
Jim, I have a question on the beef side. You ran through a lot of information, but I just want to make sure that I understand; with packer margins now turning positive, given the low drop credit, the fact that the choice elect spread is narrow, the cattle supply is tightening; how do you keep it positive? How is the outlook there strong?
Jim Lochner
I think, one key thing that’s different than what cala and feed reported; they reported a marketing number that was actually positive for December and if you heard my remarks when we look at the actual heifer slaughter data, December was 9% year-over-year less, and the quarter was 6.9%.
So we’ve had more available cattle that have come into January and February as the marketing and actual numbers are less than would be implied. So the key is right now that we’re running our business not oversupplying the demand and keeping ourselves in as good a balance as we can and we’ve seen these live cattle prices adjust accordingly.
Christina Mcglone - Deutsche Bank Securities
My follow-up is, in terms of reducing slaughter rates, is there any way to quantify the impact on your fixed cost absorption from running less per week?
Jim Lochner
The answer is yes and we have to always watch our volume versus our footprint capacity and when you do run less your fixed costs do come up. It varies by plan.
Operator
Your next question comes from Ken Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets.
Ken Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets
I’ll stick with the chicken side. It seems like from the press release you guys cut 5% production in December. The two questions that I would have would be; one is how do you see the demand outlook? And if so, if it’s going to be a little lower, does that mean that you’re going to still have year-on-year lower production going into ?09?
Donnie Smith
Ken, this is Donnie; I’ll take that. We did see demand drop in December. Our visual trigger against that was inventories increasing, so we cut production. As we look forward, we’ve kind of stabilized from that run rate, but we’re actively, as you know always out growing our business. So, what we’ll do is, we’ll just watch what our sales pace is and when that sales pace shows up, that our inventories are stabilized and we’re back in good shape, then we’ll make the next decision. We watch that math every week. On your production question; based on what we’re planning now, our growth rate ?09 over ’08, would be flat to maybe up 1%.
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