For the 70% or more of beef calves born last spring, more than the usual share veered from traditional roads to the feedyard come fall. Backgrounding those calves opened gates to several new revenue paths, though not without risk.
Choosing a feedyard is a bit like selecting a life partner. Feedyards offer different marketing opportunities and strategies. A manager should be able to look at a customer’s pen and know, “I have a good market for those cattle. I can handle it.”
He’s a sixth generation farmer and grew up on a cattle farm and apple orchard. She’s a past chemistry teacher but now works full-time on the farm with her husband. Together, they closely manage their bottom line.
Shifting cattle and plans is a constant theme, but all part of Bradley’s masterplan that is staying flexible and keeping up with new ideas. Genetics play a key role, always advancing.
The crystal ball is nonexistent. There is no magic fortune teller. No matter how good the market forecast nobody is right 100% of the time. That doesn’t mean cattlemen have to look at the future as nothing more than a blind guess.
“Do we just sign up? Or get special ear tags?”
Those are questions we hear quite often from producers who want to raise cattle for the Certified Angus Beef ® (CAB®) brand.
The pastures at Dalebanks Angus near Eureka, Kan., hide the plants’ challenge well. Native big and little bluestem adapted over the ages to thrive in the shallow soil, only a few inches deep in places, that blankets the underlying limestone. Shards of flint mingle with the roots.
Two fishing cabins stood on the edge of the San Marcos river in 1919. Sixty years later Bodey Langford connected the two, as brick-by-brick, he built a home where he and Kathy would raise daughters Anna and Callie. There on his late father’s ranch near Lockhart, Texas, he also built his herd with purpose.
M&M Feeders now includes two yards, with Jamie Huyser tackling the daily tasks at Elm Creek and Daron helps manage operations at Lexington. Mel does everything from keeping up customer relations to driving the feedtruck, while Marvin handles commodity trading from his home in Idaho.
“Change is inevitable, success is optional,” David Rutan says. That positive philosophy applied to everything from good morning to great cattle only begins to tell why Morgan Ranches earned the 2020 Certified Angus Beef Commercial Commitment to Excellence award.
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