Hello 2024! Beef Prices, TheFarmDirectory.com and More!
Howdy folks!
2023 came and went awfully quickly, didn’t it? We have two little boys now: one who just joined us back in January 2023, Zeke, and now Eli is almost turning three. Everyone warned me that they grow up so fast, and I would always nod and smile. Now I smile, and nearly shed a tear when I think about how much the boys change even day by day. Too freaking fast. But, I digress.
Alright, this project has me super excited. About a year ago, I was sitting on my best thinking chair, and was feeling sorry for myself about how difficult it is to post an ad on marketplace on Facebook for beef. Why? Because they ban all animal products. Ridiculous, right? I mean, you can go to the grocery store and buy the same thing I’m selling (well, not exactly the same, but you know what I mean) but put it on Facebook Marketplace?? Noooo, you’re a BAD PERSON for selling something that humans have literally eaten for thousands of years.
Did I sound whiny right there? You’re welcome. So, I thought to myself, whilst sitting on my thinking “chair”, why is there not a single web page that you can easily navigate, list your farm products (animals, meat, eggs, horses you are selling, hay, etc), toggle availability, and filter by location and/or radius?? It would be so cool!
Well, this idea didn’t exist at the time, so here we are. My buddy Michael offered to get the site up and running for me, and we’re like at 90% functionality right now. Go on over and check it out! We don’t have a lot of users yet, but we’d sure like to have them! If you want to be listed, shoot me an email at kenny@thefarmdirectory.com and I’ll create your account with the email you use. When it’s created, you’ll sign in as a user, and the site checks to see if I created a farmer account and links it with your user account.
You can then log in and modify all your profile, add your products, toggle availability, put in your real contact info, social links, etc. Pretty sweet, no? I think so. We’re working on getting the radius search going right now and working on visual appearance and getting some kinks out. But come see what we have! www.thefarmdirectory.com
A RODEO
I had four monster steers heading to the butcher on Valentine’s Day. I booked the appointment about 8 months prior. About a month prior to their appointment, we found out that my wife’s naturalization oath and ceremony were, conveniently, about 7.5 hours of driving on the other side of the state on the same day. So, I called my neighbor to ask him if he could haul them, and I did the sorting the day before and left them in the corrals with a bunch of hay and a full tank of water.
The story goes, my neighbor backed up to the corrals with his trailer, got out, and my steers immediately started sniffing for a way out. My father said that one extra-pudgy red steer reportedly was the ringleader and decided to try to vault out of the pen they were in. He didn’t make it, but the 20+ year old 2x10' he put his forward half on didn’t make it either. It broke and he rode the cattle panel wire fence down till he could get over center and get over the now half-height corral fence. Photo below. (Never you mind the green panel that Little John got over a few years back…!)
Got on top of the top rail, rail broke, he rode it down and curled the cattle wire down then moved on.
The other three steers followed him.
The ringleader, since he so easily broke down the first fence, decided to just locomotive himself through the next fence. He was also successful in this endeavor. Then he just plowed right through our electric perimeter fence around our feedlot to rejoin the rest of the herd. Ripped off the length of the top electric wire, and didn’t do some of the t-posts any good. Photo of the locomotive action below…
This was the second fence. Pretty sure he just ran right through it.
And the other three steers followed him.
So, after driving from Kalispell to Billings, then Bozeman, then Three Forks, then Great Falls, then back home with two boys under 3 and a wife getting over strep, I spent the next day fixing all the holes, raising a crowd gate that one of the stragglers tried to unsuccessfully jump, and plugging any and all potential holes for a rambunctious steer to make his way out of captivity.
Our second attempt at loading was successful. We backed the trailer up, got everything ready, ran the herd into the corrals, sorted out the steers we wanted, and chased them right into the trailer. Worked like a charm! I don’t know how they fared at the butcher, but the last ones I took kind of lost it when the butchers were moving them out of their pen towards the slaughterhouse. Hopefully these guys did better. But, I digress.
BEEF PRICES
Butchering went up again. I did join the Glacier Processing Cooperative so I could get appointments more readily, and I do get a discount, but the membership cost me $7k!
Price wise, I believe we’ll land around here (subject to change) for Fall 2024 butchering appointments:
Halves/wholes: $5.25/lb hanging weight (including butchering), subject to another increase in butchering.
Quarters: $9.25/lb cut and wrapped weight.
Eighths (when available, which is rarely): $10/lb cut and wrapped.
Burger: $6.50/lb
Roasts (when available): $7.50/lb
This is all subject to change, pending my updated cost analysis which will probably be unfavorable, but I’m hoping to hold the line for a bit.
Thanks for stopping by, yall! And please don’t forget to check out www.thefarmdirectory.com! We also have a Facebook page here.
Thank you for supporting your local farmers,
Be Blessed,
Kenny