Thanks,

YPC Leadership Board and Staff

During the height of irrigation season this summer I was fantasizing about ranching in an area where you could rely on rainfall to grow grass.  I spend all spring checking cows or irrigating.  By August I am ready to be done irrigating for another year.  I talked to my father about how nice it would be to live somewhere that didn’t require irrigation.  His response gave me a lot to think about.  He said, “Every place has it’s unfair advantages for cattle that allows them to compete with everybody else in this country.  One of our unfair advantages is our Forest Service permits that let us run pairs for a couple of dollars in summer.”

Do cattle work for you or do you work for cattle?  This fundamental question gets to the root of an underlining problem in today’s cattle complex, especially on the cow/calf producer side.  Too often we treat our cattle enterprise as a hobby rather than as a business whose goal is to be profitable.

I had a young man come in my office one day who wanted to purchase a new cattle trailer for his 10 cow operation.  The shinny new all aluminum trailer was almost $15,000.  After he talked for twenty minutes about all the bells and whistles of the trailer and how it would make hauling his calves to market so easy I asked him one simple question. Does a calf bring any less money if it gets to the sale barn in a $1000 trailer?  This caught him off guard and after he swallowed some humble pie we talked about the economic impact of buying that trailer.  If he took what would have been a $500 per month payment and reinvested that into his cow herd, at the end of three years he would have enough income to pay cash for the trailer if he still wanted it. More...