Is there profit at this price

Was at the sale barn today and watched some
cattle sell. This was the highest price per
pound today, but most feeder and smaller
cattle were over $2/lb. Guess for me it
would be hard to make anything at that
price.

Around here the pastures are burnt up. People are pulling cattle off and are starting to feed already. Hay is impossible to find and if you can find some it's extremely expensive. People are culling all the cattle they can.

Right now there are fat cattle contracts for $2 lb. So a 1400 pound steer will sell for $2800. I am glad I raise my own feeders as there is a lot of risk right now. Tom

Some years cow-calf operations can make more profit selling off the calves as feeders and saving the feed for next year than they would feeding out the calves to market weight. It also saves a lot of labor. Crunch the numbers.

But yet steak is super expensive.

Vito

But would you want a steak from a cull cow

It sure is, it seems to go up every week, i went out last week, and had a good supper a 8 oz sirloin, steak and a potato it was almost $32:00

Not sure where you've been, but light calves and feeders have been selling high since last spring or before. Earlier on, fly weights weren't breaking $3, but they have for awhile now. For light beef steers anyways.

The market has gotten slightly better as the summer has went on. Could of sold my 6 weight steers last spring for around $2.30 something. But, I hung onto em until they was 8 and half weights, and still got $2.37 a few months later. Kind of wondered when I was feeding them, if I was doing the right thing. But it panned out.

People seem to think it'll be a good market for 2 or 3 years. I pretty much agree. It's not looking like a peak and then back down like we seen back around 2014 or so.

Cattle numbers are down (mother cows). The big boys seem to think this will all blow over once we are out of the drout cycles we've been seeing in some areas. But those guys aren't accounting for the hudge gobs of grass being torn up and planted to corn. Your cow calf guy needs those grass acres. Your feed lot guys don't. And your calves come from those cow calf guys, not the feedlot. So unless somebody makes up the difference of dis-appearing grass lands by dry lotting cow calf pairs, those lost numbers are just going to be gone and not coming back.

Around here (my area), row crop farmers live a pretty lazy life. They are seasonal workers you might say. And they sit in a comphy cab even when they are hitting it hard. They don't want to be bothered with livestock and daily chores. Anyways, they are setting an example that others are wanting to follow. A big pasture and a big hay meadow within 2 miles of where I live got tore up just this summer even though the cattle prices are the way they are. So the high prices of cattle, don't seem to make much difference to the ones who choose to be lazy.

Hope prices hold for awhile I have a bunch of calves to sell.Historically when all the experts agree prices can't fall for at least 2 or 3 years the price drops drastically within 6 months.

Those old Cull cows were all dad wanted to butcher when I was growing up. Old tough milk cows are not my idea of steak and the reason I don't care if I ever have steak. I get more out of a good hamburger. I probably would never miss steak with all those old Cull milk cows for so many years. I have a field of hay that will not get cut this year. IF I had some cattle and a greenchopper I would feed it this year to get the hay off the field.

So is this a good price or bad? In all the years Dad raised and sold beef cattle (2007-2021) I don't think he ever saw anywhere near $2 a pound. Buy high, sell low was the name of the game.

I would really want to see someone walk up to a "row crop farmer" and call them lazy to their face...

Where are you located in Kansas?

My son has a few thousand square bales of hay he's looking to sell this winter - he's done selling for now. Prairie bales that were selling for $2.50 to $4 a bale two years ago are now in the $6 to $8 range. Brome is actually going for the same or less than prairie hay. But this is early September - he (and I) think the prices are going to be quite a bit higher in December January - when he has to pay his second semester tuition at K-State. He's been shocked at the floor price even with hay that is in obviously poor condition due to mold and weeds. After watching some sell at live auction he rebaled a some of last year's round bales that sat outside. Pretty much the entire bale went into the square baler making some pretty crappy looking bales. He made a couple hundred and sat them in piles of 30 and they brought $4.50 a bale at Clay Center auction.

I know small square bales are hardly indicative of the hay market in general because they represent a whole different customer. Anyone with no machinery or very few animals has to buy square bales. If you have 10+ head and a tractor with loader you can feed big rounds or big squares.

I would. And it wouldn't bother me any.
Anyone of them that gave up livestock to
soley be row crop farmers, knows they left
the year round dailey grime of chore work
behind. And they won't be going back to
that. And that's nothing short of admitting
to the laziness.

Your silver spoon boys that never owned a
cow in thier life, probably won't admit to
it. But thier dad who gave up the cows
would.

Maybe not all areas are the same. I'm not
from an area where every acre is a corn
feild. But if some grass can he tore up and
put to corn, people are doing it. Livestock
people are intertwined with row crop people
around here.

You probably going to throw the money thing
out there. Corn acres worth more money than
grass acres. But that's not entirely it.
Not around here anyways. People are envious
of the ones who put thier feet up when
harvest is over and watch sports until
spring. That has as much to do with it than
the dollars per acre.

That sounds like my Dad when we were kids. Fork that manure by hand, don't use the loader and be lazy.

Unless you are grain farmer that leases a new string of equipment each year there is repair and upkeep and crop delivery and supplies to purchase. Pretty much an all year job.

Been a small operator since teenager and prices are now higher than I have ever seen. Have a small bunch of cows in partnership with a son and I own the grass used every summer to grow the calves. They are calved in the fall (just waiting for the first calf to fall), weaned in the spring, put back out on grass until September. We own enough grass land to have an adequate feed supply for winter. Has been a good program for us and I think we get much more income from the cattle than we would for leasing out the grass and we don't mind the extra labor though it gets kinda testy in the winter if we have any blizzards, which if rare now-a-days. Lots of cow-calf operations here in central Kansas, but we are surrounded by the crop only farmers that have never seen a hog, cow, horse or sheep on their farm in their entire life.

It's laughable that any of you think you know more than a cattle buyer. Those guys know to the dime how much money they'll make on those cattle before they make their last bid. They're not part time, back yard farmer wannabes, they're professionals who do this stuff for a living every day. I'm not saying for a minute that I don't trust them, but when they tell you what your cattle are worth, that's what you're gonna get. As one young upstart I know found out recently too, when your cattle come in to the ring, those buyers don't care a wit what kind of tractor you have. If you don't have the genetics, you're going home with empty pockets.

About a month ago, I asked the same question about high feeder prices to a cattle guy I know. He said as long as the feedlots can get above 180 they will make money. The current six-month projection on #800 steers is $68/head in the black.

Just like dairy farms went went from a few cows and acres of crops to feed the cows to thousands of cows a not a corn field in sight the days of raising beef cows and crops on the same farm is a thing of the past.

With the ability of putting background calves on green grass all winter long and better overall conception rates and general health of the cow over wintering calves on the farm they were born on is also becoming a thing of the past.

It is more a matter of pounds a day today than buying low and selling high. Like rrlund said. These guys got this figured down to the dime of profit before they ever bid.

50+ years ago I was a high school kid working for the neighbor dairy farmer. His cousins from Oklahoma came to visit one summer. They were big grain farmers and went all out at planting and at harvest time.

After watching us milk cows twice a day and bale a couple wagon loads of hay...no kick baler, man on the wagon boy on the tractor.
One of the fellows remarked, Ya'll have to work hard to be a farmer up here!

Ken