A Rancher’s Payday

Last week, on Wednesday if you’ll recall, I was all fired up. Fired up mainly because it’s fall, but more so because it was our shipping day. You see there’s really only one time a year that a rancher gets paid. Oh, we might sell the occasional old, dry (not bred) or crazy cow (and we had to sell one of those earlier this year. She just snapped); and we might sell a handful of mis-fit yearlings in the spring or fall, but for the most part, the payday is once a year when we ship.

Some people in this part of the world, gather their cattle, sort the mamas from the babies, put the babies on a truck and take them to the nearest sale barn and sell them that way. They take what they get for the calves that day. We, on the other hand, sell our calves via video auction early in the year. This year we sold them in July. This is the 4th consecutive year we’ve sold them through Superior Livestock Auction, and the good thing about doing it this way is that we can plan ahead, through the fall, for the following year, and if you don’t like the price you get in July, there’s an auction in August too! Plus you don’t have to pay to ship your calves to the sale barn- the purchaser of the calves pays to have them picked up. And sale barns tack on other charges that you don’t have via a video auction. Furthermore, it shows your cattle to more buyers than would ever be present at a South Dakota Sale Barn on sale day.

I’m pretty sure some of you are wondering, “how in the heck do you sell calves on a video auction?”

Never fear. I’ll tell you.

It works like this.

We have x number of steer calves to sell (castrated male calves), and x number of heifer calves to sell. The Cowboy will guesstimate what he thinks they will weigh when we set them up for delivery. The steers generally outweigh the heifers so we sell them weighing something different. For example, the steers will be listed weighing 515# for delievery Oct 20-30th. And the heifers might weigh 495# for delivery Oct 20th-30th. We really do like to ship around the 20th through the 30th of October, and so that will be the earliest and latest delivery dates listed on the Auction. Our Auction Rep will come to the ranch and film the calves so that everyone watching the video can see what they look like. At this point I’m sure that some of you are wondering, “why is it important what they weigh?”.

Never fear. I’ll tell you.

It works like this.

The lighter the calf the higher the price- or typically that’s how it works. And by that I mean typically your 4 weights (400-499lb calves), bring more than your 5 weights (500-599lb calves) on a per/lb basis and 6 weights bring less than 5 weights. For example- a 4 weight steer, this year, might have brought between $1.30- $1.41/lb. or $141.00/ 100 lbs. or $564 per calf. A 5 weight steer calf might have brought $1.31 to $1.38/lb or $131.00/100 lbs or $655/calf. Sometimes they bring something funky, like $1.3295 or $132.95/100 lbs. I always think it’s funny when they do that. But I’m easily amused. Cattle can also go for different prices based on where they are located in the country- even in the same weight category. Almost always, at least on the video auctions, it seems the cattle from, TX, OK, KS, NM and CO don’t usually bring as much as those from MT, SD or WY. It’s a difference in grass and weather and how they’re raised. I’m not saying that’s always true. It’s just an observation. We have great grass here; we believe it’s some of the best grass in the country.

Now, you’re probably wondering “how exactly do you weigh your calves”?

Never fear. I’ll tell you.

It works like this.

With each auction be it a sale barn or video auction, you give the buyer what is called “shrink”. Basically that boils down to the amount of pee and poo your calves will expel while on the truck. Typically it’s about 2%. That being said, the trucks go to a huge truck scale- empty. They are weighed. And the weight of the truck is saved. Once the truck is loaded, it returns to the scale, where it is weighed again. Then that weight is subtracted from the first weight giving you X. Each truck only holds so many calves, in this case we’ll say 100 calves. The new weight of the load, X, is divided by 100 giving you the weight per calf. Then the shrink is figured and that’s how you know if you made weight or not. And by that I mean, how close you came to having your calves weigh what you guesstimated at the beginning of the year. There isn’t a penalty to having them weigh less than you said they would weigh, except that you cost yourself money. If they were supposed to be 550# steers and they only ended up weighing 530# then more than likely, you cost yourself several cents per head as a 530# steer should bring slightly more than a 550# steer. Not always, but usually. You don’t usually get the weight right on- it’s about getting as close as you can and Zach is pretty darn good at that.

Always on shipping day, there are calves that don’t make the load- calves that say, were late calves for whatever reason, or calves that maybe had a mama that didn’t produce a lot of milk either because she’s an older, poorer doing cow, or because she’s just not cut out to raise a big baby. Those calves are culled and depending on the size, are either put back with the mother, or we sell them to someone else to put them on feed. There are also heifer calves that don’t make the load because we keep them as replacements. This year we kept about 65 of the middle of the road heifers, because we needed to put a lot of the best heifers on the truck to make weight. There’s nothing wrong with these- they just didn’t weigh quite as much as those we put on the truck. Of those, we’ll keep about 40, so 25 of those will go to sale barn soon. Replacement heifers are calves that we will raise and then breed. We’ll use them to replace some of our older cows. Not this year of course, because we can’t breed them yet, but in the future they’ll be used.

Shipping this year, took the better part of a day by the time you gather, sort, load, run to the scales, eat lunch at 4pm, and then count cows and heifer calves again. It is a day of hard work, but it’s also one of the best days of the year. There’s also work to be done a couple days after shipping- there are mama cows standing around bawling for their babies, and there are the runt babies that need paired back up with their moms and put into a different pasture (that was Thursday and Friday’s job), and then finally once we have all the other work done, the cows get kicked back into a different pasture away from the bawling heifers that are left in the corral. This particular day left us with two heifers in the corral who looked like this:

Why yes, those are porcupine quills in her nose!

But that’s a story for another time. And that, my friends, is how a rancher’s payday works. At least at this outfit.