The cattle business today has evolved into several distinct segments.
Each draws certain people whose personality, skill and savvy make them
best suited to that segment.
We’ll start with the purebred breeders, the architects who design
prototypes for the industry. They are academic minded. They steep
themselves in statistics, fiddle with and refine genetics in an effort
to define subjective traits, objectively, not unlike ancient mariners
drawing and redrawing the constellations in the night sky.
The next segment is the commercial cow/calf operator. They are the
bedrock of the industry; the worker on the assembly line. They produce
our product, beef, from scratch just as a welder builds a bumper guard, a
cook bakes an apple pie and an artist paints a picture. They think in
terms of generations (both human and bovine), take the good with the bad
and have a loyalty to the land.
The grower, segment 3, takes calves once they’ve been weaned and
keeps them until they are big enough to go to the feedlot. These grower
calves come from a wide variety of sources; farms, ranches, sale barns,
dairies, dog pounds, gypos, traders and team ropers.
It is a hands-on, intensive, frustrating demanding job. It’s
equivalent to teaching Kindergarten through third grade, lots of
babysitting. Economically, it’s like buying used cars and trying to make
them re-saleable.
Segment 4 is the Feedlot. This is where we take a new car off the
show room floor and turn it into a NASCAR Sprint contender. Today
average daily gain, conversion, genetics, fixed expenses, health
problems, purchase price, feed price and sale date are predictable
within reason. But predicting the market, the sale price 120 days later
is like rolling the dice.
Those who call themselves cattle feeders could easily be wild-catters
in the oil business, prospectors, explorers, crap shooters, test
pilots, magicians’ assistants, circus acrobats, punt returners or Wall
Street Speculators. They thrive on risk.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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