Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Lee Pitts: Cowboy Church

 The last auction market in our county shut down a few years ago and it was like having our collective heart ripped out. Just this year the auction market that handled the most cattle of any sale barn in California for decades closed its doors too. When we bought a livestock newspaper that served the livestock auction industry 35 years ago there were some 1,500 auction markets in America. Today it’s half that.

The auction market was the heart and soul of the cattle business in my area. I hope I’m not being sacrilegious when I say it was like a church. Once a week we’d gather to see our friends who sat in the exact same seats they always sat in. If one of those seats was unoccupied we’d all ask, Is Jim okay? is Dick sick, or, where’s G.B.? I’ve been in some sale barns that go so far as to paint the buyer’s name on the back of the seat and no one else ever had the nerve to sit there.

Now without an auction barn we have no place to visit, to catch up on the gossip or to see for ourselves how much our cattle are worth and why some are worth more than others. We’d eat at the coffee shop and solve all the world’s ills. Our county cattlemen’s group met there once month and many of us attended educational seminars before a sale to learn how, where and with what to properly vaccinate our animals with. There was an annual bull sale where you could buy better bulls to improve your herd and a replacement female sale that had a wide reputation for selling quality females. We knew that we always had a place to sell an old cow or two, and if we had some extra grass, buy a few stockers. And we could pick up a check the same day we sold them!

It’s ads from auction barns that kept many livestock newspapers afloat and the money that ranchers spend in town one day a week is important to barber shops, the feed mill, the local farm supply, western wear shop and, if the check for the animals you sold was a big one, fancy restaurants.

If the sale barn was a church it’s religion was price discovery. The big debate going on in the cattle business right now is how to force the packer to competitively bid on our fat cattle as the bulk of fat cattle these days are sold in secret marketing agreements with captive feedlots where we never know the price. No wonder the packers are making upwards of a thousand bucks per head for owning a beast for one week. The only reason the beef industry hasn’t gone down the same road as the pork and poultry producers is because we still have competitive bidding at auction markets and their offshoots, video livestock sales. The chicken pluckers never had auctions and when the pork producers lost theirs they also lost 90% of their producers.

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