Sustainable Farming - Cattle Auctions and Mailing a Shirt
Yesterday, I took the shirt off my back and mailed it to the auction house where our heiferettes got sold. Ok, maybe not literally, but it definitely happened. We got a horrible price for our heiferettes that we fed all winter. One side of "Sustainable" is that you are making money so you can continue to farm. That leads me to a discussion on cattle marketing and auctions.
The major downside to buying and selling cattle is the inherent risk of selling to an unknown buyer at an unknown price: the cows are worth whatever the people who happen to be at that specific auction, on that specific day, think that they are worth.
What you think they are worth, what you paid for them, and how much it cost you to feed them is entirely irrelevant to the people at the auction. They don't care. They want to buy the cows as cheaply as possible and if the guy who usually pays the premium for the better animals is not at that specific auction, on that specific day, well, everyone else gets a bargain.
Somebody got our cows super cheap yesterday. Because the guy who usually is at this auction wasn't there. And that really sucks for us.
And this is why we at KD Farms, among other reasons, are trying to start direct marketing our beef cattle rather than buying skinny cows and selling fat cows. Because, on one hand, you have a farmer who does one thing well: raise cows and get them fat. Farmers are good at feeding cows and raising crops, but they're bad (and pretty much every farmer will admit it) at marketing what they raise.
On the other hand, you have a professional cattle buyer who does one thing well: buy cheap cows for his customers. And that's all they do. They work hard at it. They set the market, basically, but it's not relative to actual conditions sometimes.
So, for a farmer, it's essentially gambling. It's a stock market play that's not just a click of a mouse. It's a stock market play that costs you several hours a day of feeding, hundreds of tons of feed, and hundreds of hours of expensive machine time for not only feeding the animals but also harvesting and storing the feed.
When you get a good price at the auction, life is good. When you get a bad price, well, you really end up doing some soul-searching for a while. Second guessing your decisions, what went well, what didn't, what should we change next year, etc. Then, eventually, you dust the earth off your face, pick yourself up, and keep truckin'.
Be Blessed. -Kenny
Phillipians 4:19