Jade Meinzer
I wonder how different the old trail songs would be if they were written today. In the last 150 years we have seen dramatic shifts in the way that we market beef cattle. Gone are the days of spending the summer nights sleeping under the stars in your bedroll as someone stood night guard over the herd. You would probably have to fight a little more traffic and some Kansas farmers probably wouldn’t be any too happy about a herd of cattle being driven through their crops. Dodge City is still a Cowtown, but this day in age sees those cattle in feedyards and a couple different packing houses within the town. The rail lines run all over the country now, and frankly I don’t remember the last time that I saw an engine pulling a set of cattle cars. Many folks don’t even know that the carload show at big stock shows like Denver and Fort Worth are referring to the amount of beef you could fit inside a train car! Today we ship beef coast to coast in chrome plated semis that pull quad axle cattle pots.
We recently sold four loads of calves on the video sale. Can you imagine what our predecessors would have thought? While cleaning out my late grandparents’ house, we found a receipt for the sale of a few heifers from the early part of the 1900’s. Those cattle were marketed through a broker, placed on a train and sold in the Kansas City stockyards. That was a distance of 600 miles from where home was! A few years later, my grandpa told the story of marketing his calves in the Denver Stockyards where the National Western Stock Show is today. The growth of local livestock auctions made it more convenient for ranchers to market their products. Order buyers would fill the seats, but they were limited to the cattle on the sale for that day in that specific barn. Those cattle likely came from a radius of about two hundred miles give or take for that specific barn.
Let’s fast forward to modern times. As modern ranchers, we have more options for marketing our products than we ever did before. With the use of video marketing, and internet bidding, cattle can be bought and sold from literally anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection. We can add some risk protection to our calves with programs like LRP and we can even hedge them on the board of trade if we are feeling like gamblers. Theres third party verification that adds value by proving that the genetics we say we are using are the ones that are actually being used. There are scores that are produced by breed associations that predict how the animals will feed out, and what buyers can expect these cattle to do on the rail.
One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the fact that we sell pounds of beef, and price discovery has always been a huge part of that. A good auctioneer can change the outcome of a selling price simply by his interaction with the buyers. Watching a livestock auction is watching supply and demand in real time. Sellers do their best to make their product a little better than everyone else, and buyers do their best to get the best quality product for the most reasonable price. Competition drives the market, and true price discoveries happen in a matter of minutes.
I cannot wait to see the future of marketing our product. Our industry is one of the few that is still largely based on integrity and mutual respect for the buyer and the seller. That’s about all for this time, remember to keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and be sure to take your smartphone with you to buy a load of calves when you are on your next beach vacation. God Bless!