From the Barns: Fat market strong

Last month I mentioned the long list of jobs and projects that needed to be done here at the farm. That list hasn’t gotten any shorter. Even though we have been able to cross off some of those tasks, we seem to keep adding to it. I guess the fact that we are knocking off some of them is a positive thing, but it is taking a lot of 12- to 13-hour days to get them done. I am thankful that we are able to get these things accomplished and try not to let the frustrations overshadow the good.

Breeding season recently got underway. The 117 open replacement heifers were time bred last week and with a five-man crew each performing their specific role, we got those girls bred in less than four hours. Sorted them out of the breeding chutes into three different groups and then three days later hauled them out to summer pastures. This evening, clean-up bulls were placed with them. Tomorrow we will be pulling CIDRs from the cow group, but instead of time breeding, the guys are going to do heat detection and breed them as they come in. Last Saturday, we rounded up these more than 90 cows with their calves and vaccinated and dewormed all the cows along with the CIDR. We were also able to get all the fall calving cows vaccinated and dewormed two to three weeks ago and hopefully they will have smooth sailing until time to calve.

We did end up shipping out three loads of fat cattle this past month and I just sold another load to be delivered July 5. The fat market has remained strong and with favorable feed costs and ideal feeding weather, feeding and finishing is going about as good right now as we could possibly hope for.

The past week has seen us add 170 head of new cattle. Three 25- to 35-head groups from producers using our bulls and they were already weaned and vaccinated. The other 70 head came in yesterday from Tennessee, probably calves born late last summer. Weighing 685, mixed Angus and Charolais cross, pretty good set of cattle. Got them processed today.

The rye and ryegrass grazing is obviously over and I look forward to having time to run the numbers to see what our cost per day turned out to be. We have followed that with drilling more than 100 acres of Sudangrass the past couple of days. We did a burndown of the weeds and grasses, and with good moisture in the ground, I am expecting a good and quick emergence.

We need to get some of the cattle we’ve had a while sorted and matched up, with most of them going into the feedlot. We just haven’t been able to get in and get those feedlot fences welded in, so that has gotten us stymied a bit and delayed getting those cattle in and on a finishing diet like they need to be. As I said, hard to get to everything on that list, but we need to move that up to priority level now that the AI breeding is about behind us.

Going to turn hot on us in about a week, so we need to prepare for that, especially regarding heat stress management for the cattle. Always got to be looking ahead, planning and prioritizing and we just have to try to do the best we can possibly can. Hoping for a good month ahead.