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.
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