Beef is beef, and good beef is good beef.  That's my motto.

 If you look around the country, you'll find a lot of black cattle.  When I was a the sale a feew weeks ago - a sale of 4,800 head - there were a lot of black yearlings moved through the ring.  And, just for the record (and to save my own rear), I am not against black cattle.  At all.  There are a lot of good black cattle out there.  At the same time, I don't have any reservations about letting my partiality to red cattle known.  It's the type of operation I grew up on, and I can't lie about how much I like seeing a hundred head of reds scattered across the hillside.

I called up my dad a few weeks ago to talk cows.  I'd been thinking about this color topic for awhile, so I asked him if he ever noticed a disparity between the way his sets of red calves sold in the ring compared to blacks.  Apparently, two or three years back, dad took his heifers to town.  They were the second tier set as he'd already pulled his replacements out.  That same sale, a black cattle breeder brought some of the replacement heifers he'd kept back and didn't need.  They were the best of a quality black operation, and dad's red heifers topped the sale.

That was the long answer to a question that simply could be answered with "No, color doesn't matter.  Quality does."

And that's just one example.  Like any cattlemen knows, sometimes the quality just isn't there due to a variety of reasons. A bull that doesn't produce like he should have.  Bad weather.  Poor feed.  My dad's set of calves this year wouldn't top a cull cow sale, it sounds like; it's just been one of those years.

Everyone has their preferences, just like my preference is for red cattle.  But I think it's easy to get too focused on one particular trait at the cost of others.  On a world that is bent on black cattle, sometimes hide color becomes too much of a priority.  The same goes for any other breed of cattle.  My dad doesn't keep a heifer as a replacement just because she's got red on her back, and he won't load a cow for town simply because she's black.

Beef is beef, and good beef is good beef.  Quality wins every time; that's my motto. 

The smoke drifted hazily up to the rafters, and the cadence of the auctioneer's voice sounded just like I remembered. The cattle in the ring, a nice set of black steer calves, sold just under a dollar, and I smiled. The market was up, the buyers were in the seats - it was gonna be fun.

I haven't been to a livestock auction in years. I used to go with my dad when I was growing up. We didn't go that often - there was too much work to get done, but when he was looking for replacement heifers or selling the cull cows, we'd hay and feed and then head to the sale. Oddly enough, I don't ever remember looking around and wondering why there weren't many other girls there, especially young ones as I was. Everybody knew dad and I just thought that's where I was supposed to be.

The best sales to go to, of course, were the yearling sales. There's an energy surrounding yearling sales that doesn't exist at a cow sale. Maybe it's because all the feedlot buyers are there. Maybe it's because a year of hard work and hard times are sitting in the ring. Maybe it's because there's just something about seeing a nice set of red steers...or black, white or yellow...milling about in the ring. Everyone in the crowd kind of leans forward when one of those nice sets of calves come through the gates. There is an appreciation for good beef at a livestock auction that doesn't exist outside of this world.

The thing is, the cattle business can feel awfully lonely. If it's not calving struggles, it's shortage of feed, bad weather or slow market prices. And all of those lead to the ultimate problem of the banker knocking on the door wanting his money. Pretty soon, it feels like you're the only one facing these problems. Cubicle workers don't have to fight mud or lie awake at night wondering if they should keep the steers on feed for another two weeks in hopes of the market improving, and sometimes the overwhelming task of trying to beat the odds gets pretty heavy.

Popping into the sale last week reminded me what I liked so much about the livestock auction. It's a culture. It's a support group - in an informal, unspoken way. Just looking around, you realize you're not in this business alone, and sometimes, that's all it takes to help you jump out of bed ready to face another day.

It is calving season here in the Palouse hills of Eastern Washington. That wonderful time of year when Murphy's Law takes full effect: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I'm almost nearly completely 100% positive that even if a rancher watched his cow herd every single minute of the day, had top notch calving facilities and spent eight years becoming a vet...something would still go wrong a lot sooner rather than later.

A couple weeks ago, we* were wrapping up a day of work when part of the crew brought in a cow that had been working at calving all day with no calf to show for it. The sun had slipped below the towering edges of the Snake River canyons long before that and so, with the hum of a diesel engine in the background, we snugged the cow up to a post to investigate the issue in the glow of the truck's headlights.

Fifteen minutes of sorting out More...

Hello from eastern Washington! Erica here and happy to be joining the ranks of the Cattle Call bloggers. If it was still 2009, I’d say I was more excited to be blogging

for Cattle Call than I get on double coupon day, but I vowed to stop using such ridiculous comparisons when the calendar rolled over to 2010.

Let’s see, as a courtesy to all the folks who don’t know me, you’re probably wondering who I am and why I’m blogging for Cattle Call. Actually the people who do know me are likely still wondering the same thing.

First off, I’m not a from-the-dirt Washingtonian. I transplanted myself a few years ago from the thriving metropolis of…Iowa. Take a left at the cornfield, and you’re there. Take another right and then a left and hike up the hill, and you’d be on the commercial cow-calf ranch that I grew up on in southwest Iowa. In a world that is going black beef cattle or bust, our operation was and is focusing on the color red. Beef is beef and good beef is good beef, but more on that in a future post.

I left the ranch to get a college education, pursuing sports management and criminal justice. Why? I have no idea. Just further proof that I didn’t have life figured out at 18 despite all of my attempts at the time to argue otherwise. I moved to Washington shortly after I graduated college for a job in Wazzu athletics – go Cougs! – and then got back into the ag business with my current job as the communications manager for the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council. Occasionally, every once in a while, possibly every other day, I have to take a step back and away from something to realize how very important and vital it is to who I am as a person. That’s how it was with me and agriculture and especially with me and the beef cattle industry. More...