Cattle farmers not cashing in..............

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Lucky said:
Do we need to ban together and just say NO at the sale until the prices are were we want?
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:) I've never seen that work, but I've seen it back fire a bunch of times. Feed lots will hold out hold out until they get the price they want. It usually never comes, and all the while they are feeding those cattle making heavy carcasses, putting more meat in the cooler, and basically shooting them selves in the foot.
 
Lucky said:
What is an acceptable per hd profit for you to continue? $100, $500, $10,000? Should you be able to support a family of 5 on 300 hd and keep it as a generational operation? For the life of me I can't understand ranchers complaining about having to feed their cows through the winter. Every business has expenses, the products I sell at the other business aren't free to me. If someone comes up with a good plan to raise prices I'd jump in both feet. Do we need to ban together and just say NO at the sale until the prices are were we want? How about start a Coop with COOL and NCBA and buy out JBS. All I hear is a bunch of blah blah blah poor us. Steve Stratford and Corbit Wall both talk a good game but there's no action. I'll be the first to admit I don't have the answers but I will put it all on the line if someone has a good plan we can get behind. Our Cattle make money every year but I put allot of time and struggles in to find something that works for us. I quit talking to most of the local guys about things because all they do is complain about how unfair things are and how they just don't see how I can afford to feed the Cattle. If you keep doing what you've always done you'll get what you've always got and if you change plans every month you'll never get anywhere.
The real question is what do we want and what do we need to do to get there? Are you willing to risk it all to get there? A man told me one day that he loved to see his neighbor do good because if his neighbor could do well for himself so could he. At the time I blew it off but I think about that allot and he was right.
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I would say absolutely yes a family should be able to make it with 300 head, we are trying to do it with 50 cows. I don't think there is a magic number as everybodys' expenses are going to be different. I lost my arse on a business years ago, because I could not buy products wholesale for what the big stores were selling at retail, been through that. Now I guess I the right thing to do is accept that its now a corporate world and we can all just buy food from foreign owned monopolies.
As far as NCBA, it looks like they are in the pockets of the packers, I don't see them as being aligned with producers interests.
I don't have an answer to solve the problems, but it will definitely take people having conversations to sort things out, and then working from the local levels.
 
Ky hills said:
As far as NCBA, it looks like they are in the pockets of the packers, I don't see them as being aligned with producers interests.
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If they aren't representing the producers then why do the producers fund the NCBA with membership dues?
Remember that some producers are also packers, the NCBA is representing their interests. Maybe we need to take the "if you can't beat them, join them" philosophy. Gardiner and other large cattle producers banded together years ago to form US Premium Beef, then they bought into National Beef packers. All I'm saying is that they figured out some that works for them. As some producers go out of business they could be in a position to take over and expand.
 
faster horses said:
That sounds good now...but if 'everyone' started doing it, prices on these cattle would go up and there would be no incentive to take the risk. Not everyone can spend the time attending sales in order to get cattle bought, especially if you live MILES from a livestock market and it takes you most of the day to get there and get home again. There is always the cost of freight if you do live far from the market. Figuring out the best market to buy from and the best market to sell into can have you covering lots of miles in different directions.
Just my thoughts from living in a very rural part of America. Not saying it can't be done.

A friend who runs sheep and cattle posted something to this effect: "I sold my lambs today. One calf would have to bring $1804 to bring what the equivalent selling lambs/wool did."

Maybe sheep is the answer. Or goats. In WY the old saying was "we run sheep for profit and cows for pride."
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I certainly understand what I wrote is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people on this board who don't live in areas that you and I would consider "a very rural part of America."

I sat through a big sheep sale at La Grande OR. Lambs sold for $2.50 a pound. Ring load lots of 70- 80 lambs at a shot. A couple hours of that. So 100 pound lambs at $2.50 a pound is $250 each for the lambs. They say you can run 5 or 6 ewes on the same pasture as one cow. Plus twins. Sheep look a lot more profitable than cattle.
 
J+ Cattle said:
As some producers go out of business they could be in a position to take over and expand.
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What part of this do people not get? Of course producers are going out of business, but not much is going back into farmland around here. It's growing houses and development.
When all the much maligned small farms are gone and apparently small means a lot bigger than I previously thought, these great benevolent packers are going to figure out a way to bring in beef from South America and the people here will have little choice and be at the mercy of multi national companies for more and more of their food. That is a national security issue if there ever was one.
We are in an area that is still a significant cow/calf area, but very few if any feed lots or packing facilities except small local ones. We don't even have a decent market to sell fat cattle. If they are sold on the market here they are bought at huge discount and shipped some where else. There absolutely needs to be a regional option to sell besides the current system.
I have not paid dues to the NCBA in many years, however they still get funded byway of the Rip Off I mean Check Off.
 
Dave said:
I sat through a big sheep sale at La Grande OR. Lambs sold for $2.50 a pound. Ring load lots of 70- 80 lambs at a shot. A couple hours of that. So 100 pound lambs at $2.50 a pound is $250 each for the lambs. They say you can run 5 or 6 ewes on the same pasture as one cow. Plus twins. Sheep look a lot more profitable than cattle.
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Sheep take a lot more management and have a higher death loss then cattle,especially if you don't have a top notch predator control program
 
Nesikep said:
it was just a year or two ago that apparently in Australia, a country that has all the infrastructure relating to sheep, the producers weren't getting paid enough for the wool to cover shearing costs
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Wool has been doing OK for a couple of years now and sheep no.'s may even be growing. The wool market I think is a bit limited with big Chinese mills capable of manipulating the market a bit, they seem to stockpile the wool and then don't buy to drive the market down. Exclusion predator fencing has got a good go on in sheep producing districts and has been a bit of a game changer with dingoes/wild dogs. It also has a spin off with keeping roos out and conserving a lot of feed.
I'm not a sheep producer so am going from what I read and can remember.

Ken
 
HDRider said:
I am having great luck doing just that.

It is hard. People just do not have the freezer space. They cannot afford a freezer. They don't have space to add a freezer. They are afraid to add freezer space after hearing horror stories of spoiled beef after a power failure. And a myriad of other legitimate reasons to be be reluctant to buy halves and wholes.

The real solution is going to be smaller processors that cater to retail sale of hamburger and piece sales with the smaller processors getting live animals from local beef producers like us.

The current value chain of sale barn, backgrounder, feed lot are under the thumb of the mega processors.
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When I was a kid, there was a place in town that rented freezer space. They were walk-in freezers. There were still people living in homes that were built before rural electric, and still not upgraded with much more than one outlet and one pull string light in each room.

Those freezers were rented/leased to mostly individuals who would share space. I remember seeing banana boxes (no jokes here, please) with folks last name written on them, stacked side-by-side meat that belonged to someone else.

Those freezers disappeared in the early '80s. Could something similar even work nowadays?
 
Ky hills said:
When all the much maligned small farms are gone and apparently small means a lot bigger than I previously thought, these great benevolent packers are going to figure out a way to bring in beef from South America and the people here will have little choice and be at the mercy of multi national companies for more and more of their food. That is a national security issue if there ever was one.
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That says it all. Let's depend on foreign countries for more of the things we need to live, makes perfect sense to me.

I fail to understand why we place so many essential manufactured products in someone else's hands.
 
Stocker Steve said:
How doe



So we all become quail and pheasant hunters?
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Pay attention to why some support UBI, under the motto of you will own nothing and be happy.

I don't know where this ship is going, and I don't know whose hand is on the tiller.

There is a deep fear in the monied crowd for what happen to, and with, the 8 billion people in the world when AI and automation are the means of production. My worry is more academic than real. I will be dead soon, and my kids, and their kids will rise and fall with the economies of their time.
 
Ouachita said:
When I was a kid, there was a place in town that rented freezer space. They were walk-in freezers. There were still people living in homes that were built before rural electric, and still not upgraded with much more than one outlet and one pull string light in each room.

Those freezers were rented/leased to mostly individuals who would share space. I remember seeing banana boxes (no jokes here, please) with folks last name written on them, stacked side-by-side meat that belonged to someone else.

Those freezers disappeared in the early '80s. Could something similar even work nowadays?
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Our local, (still come to the farm and butcher) locker has shelves you can rent in there freezer.
 
Ouachita said:
When I was a kid, there was a place in town that rented freezer space. They were walk-in freezers. There were still people living in homes that were built before rural electric, and still not upgraded with much more than one outlet and one pull string light in each room.

Those freezers were rented/leased to mostly individuals who would share space. I remember seeing banana boxes (no jokes here, please) with folks last name written on them, stacked side-by-side meat that belonged to someone else.

Those freezers disappeared in the early '80s. Could something similar even work nowadays?
Click to expand...
Our little town had the same thing. My understanding is they were used mostly by farmers to hold their animal harvest for their own use. Farmers were free to sell to anyone at that time.

Then things changed
In 1965, ARS' Consumer and Marketing Service was reorganized to include the Meat Inspection Division and Poultry Division, merging federal meat and poultry inspection into one program.​
 
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