Calf to Carcass Project

[JWBrahman]

If you are in East Texas and or West Mississippi this may be a good opportunity for you as well.

The Louisiana Calf to Carcass project is a program in which Louisiana beef cattle producers can participate by sending a minimum of three steers to the feedlot while retaining ownership of them throughout the feeding period. The cattle are pre-conditioned at Dean Lee Research Station in Alexandria and then shipped to Hitch Feed Lot in Oklahoma to be fed.

The purpose of the program is to learn more about your cattle and how they compare to other cattle in the feedlot from across the nation.

This educational project is conducted jointly by the LSU AgCenter, McNeese State University, Louisiana Cattlemen's Association and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

You are encouraged to participate in the Calf to Carcass project this year. The cattle performance and carcass information you will receive through this program is useful in making management decisions on breeding, bull selection, nutrition and herd health. Valuable marketing information also is obtained. The exposure to preconditioning and retained ownership of your calves, plus the educational tour in the spring, makes the Calf to Carcass project an outstanding educational program for Louisiana cattle producers.

For more information on the Louisiana Calf to Carcass Program, contact Dr. Timothy Page at (225) 578-7906 or Matt Martin at (318) 767-3968.

 

[AllForage]

Pretty cool, wish there was something like that up here. I plan on grain finishing a few next fall to see where my cattle fit into that market.

 

[JWBrahman]

The price is worth it. In the end you make more than you would at the salebarn if you have been making the hard choices in your breeding program. Either way you learn if you have the opportunity to make more money or lose money by retaining ownership through the feedlot.

The way I see it you have to pay the vig to a breed association to get that data or you can pay the feedlot to give you the data. The breed association isn't going to offer to buy my calves on contract.

 

[Fire Sweep Ranch]

They do that out here in SW MO. Our next feed out is starting next week. Breeders consign feeder steers, from one to 20, and we all meet at Joplin Regional Stockyards for a rib eye dinner, then Run each breeder group of cattle across the scales to grade and score. They are then shipped to Iowa to be fed out and data collected at harvest. We then reconvene around June to look at the data collected. Anyone can come, even if you have no cattle consigned, to learn how to evaluate calves at an early age and we have a little contest to see if we can guess how the cattle will grade when on the rail. I feel humbled to be asked to speak to the group of observers and owners (usually several hundred show up) while we evaluate each breeders group this year.