From the Barns: Folks like beef

There are no words to adequately describe this fat cattle market. “Nuts” is the only thing that seems to describe what is going on right now. Nate asked me the other day, “When was the last time you were mad at taking $219 for fats?” Just today, when the packers were offering $224. That is an unbelievable amount of money.

I spent 25 years working with beef associations and checkoff programs. We were constantly working on beef demand and trying to ensure market share and always under the assumed reality that consumers would, at the drop of a hat, switch their buying habits and buy only pork and chicken if beef got too high priced.

Great theory, but it appears a little short on reality now that we actually have the huge price spread we were always so afraid of. Reality is, folks like their beef and they are going to buy it — evidently, you can only eat so much chicken. We are short cows to fill up a couple of pastures, but paying $4,500 for females is really hard to get your head wrapped around.

Pasture and hayfields look great and making a huge pile of hay won’t be hard, but we still have quite a bit of hay left over from last year and an equally impressive pile of corn silage, too. Nothing will go hungry this year, for sure.

The corn and bean crop has been going in easy in our area and lots of fields are getting that green look already. We had Kaden aerial seed reed canary grass with his drone on a field that is historically wet. We ran the vertical tillage machine over the field to smooth out the knife marks and tracks, then dropped the seed in and let the rain cover the seed. I am hopeful this method works well as it is dead-on accurate for seed placement.

Nate also had Kaden fly on sorghum-sudangrass on his cow-wintering lots. That worked well, also. We have spring applied quite a lot of manure on pasture and the response has been impressive. You can really tell what gets hit with manure and really see the rabbit runs where you run wide and on the ends where you turn around. I’ve been using the GPS on the applicator tractor and it really pays off.

We are running wide open calving now. Green grass is a great place for the calves to land and they are up looking for a meal in a manner of minutes. New corn and new calves don’t appreciate cold stress, so May is a good time for both to get started.

The track season is wide open right now, as well, and many, if not most, late afternoons Linda and I and our tricksters, other grandfolks, Bob and Kathy, are cruising to some track venue to see our kids compete. All this hustling around will culminate in the next few weeks with the state track meets and graduations all wrapping up about the same time. On to summer and our next adventure.