Getting destroyed at market w/ red and white, black w/white legs

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JTM

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I am wondering how bad this problem is across the country when it comes to taking up to 20 ct. less per dollar on red, red and white, or black with white? I have begun keeping almost all of my feeder steers because I keep getting very low prices for anything that isn't solid black. If they feed just as good, weigh the same with same or even smaller frame size, it just doesn't matter if their not black.
 

Okotoks

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The only ones that seem to really get docked in our area are the red with white marks and sometimes the solid whites. We seem to be able to sell the reds and roans with no problem. Makes no sense.
 

knabe

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aren't there some "steer futurity" programs at universities any more comparing different breeds or crossing programs?

used to be involved with one at cal poly for 3 years.  i thought it was pretty interesting.  don't remember more than one pen of shorthorns or any maine's or fullblood maine's back then at all.  lots of herefords, angus, gelbvieh (not black), limousin, simmental, longhorn, different brahman influence, there might have been a red angus, charolais.

must be a reason they get docked.  maybe that's where they can make money by docking them so much.  if they dock them so they all make the same margin, it would be nice to see some proof of that.  on the other hand, 50% of the market requires no marbling at all and prime meat is still on sale at costco.
 
J

JTM

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knabe,
I'm interested, why would you say that 50% of the market "requires" no marbling at all? Do you mean, 50% of the market has no marbling but still brings market price? Or is there something simple I am missing there?
 

Show Heifer

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There was some discussion about this under another post... can't recall the title but something like "Will shorthorns survive in the long term"

Buyers in my area won't touch a colored calf. They will buy blacks, and SOME butterscotch, and SOME reds, but if they have color they just don't want them.  I would guess that past history has taught them that those "colored" calves do not perform as well as the solids.
 

knabe

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JTM said:
knabe,
I'm interested, why would you say that 50% of the market "requires" no marbling at all? Do you mean, 50% of the market has no marbling but still brings market price? Or is there something simple I am missing there?

50% of the market requires hamburger.  taco bell etc, low quality grocery stores that service low income areas.  one cattleman out here, that's all he services and only buyers lower end cattle.  market price is whatever.  he buys cattle that small producers take to the market and he groups them.  not saying he does awesome, but he never buys "good" cattle.  just saying there is a market for meat other than premium markets.  he looks for cattle that are undernourished and are light for their frame.

to me, market price is an average carcass, say choice minus, of whatever weight, yield.
 

trevorgreycattleco

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Show Heifer said:
There was some discussion about this under another post... can't recall the title but something like "Will shorthorns survive in the long term"

Buyers in my area won't touch a colored calf. They will buy blacks, and SOME butterscotch, and SOME reds, but if they have color they just don't want them.  I would guess that past history has taught them that those "colored" calves do not perform as well as the solids.

The colored calf beliefs are ABSOLUTELY the dumbest thing I have ever been apart of in raising cattle. The buyers that discount these calves laugh all the way to the bank when they finish them. It's a joke. I had to be removed from the stockyard once because of the crap they pull. I personally think roans perform as well as solids. It's all bogus. Past history has taught them to buy low and sell high, nothing more. If I or you was a buyer, wouldn't you do the same thing? We are all in this to try and make money. I have talked to some buyers, I have been told off colored cattle don't look as uniform as the solids and that is the only reason it happens. It's a scam for them to make more money and we let it happen.
 
J

JTM

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Knabe,
I figured you were talking about low quality markets. I guess my point is, a lot of those calves going to hamburger at taco bell, etc., are still bringing more at market than a red and white calf that would feed out better and have better tasting meat.

Trevorguycattle,
I feel the same as you. I really don't think that a lot of the buyers who are buying for the stockers really know the difference. They assume that black means angus and angus means better. I don't necessarily disagree with Angus being better than most but black doesn't mean angus anymore...
 

aj

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western kansas
Pretty much the same deal here with spots and whatever. I have seen them split a ring of solid reds and blacks also. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. They don't understand the color variations in Shorthorns. To uniformed people it means a variation of parentage....I think.
 

Mark H

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Okotoks,

How big are the groups you are selling?  Are they singles, small groups or pot loads at one time?  Singles or small groups get hammered when sold since aggregating small groups to fill a truck can be a hassle.  Also how uniform are they in terms of size, color, muscle etc. ?
Also cattle that finish to a leaner end point and grow faster are more efficient allowing feeders to pay more for them.  The spread between fatter cattle and leaner finished cattle has narrowed making producing  cattle that produce HRI cattle not an attractive option.  This particularly true in Canada where leaner cattle are preferred.
Lastly, in Alberta shorthorns are not mainstream and if you use breeds that buyers do not normally get orders for you will be relegated into the "buy if it is cheap category". This is the price of doing your own thing in the cattle business.  If you want to see if the dock is justified send the calves to a custom lot-if you have the numbers.  Feeding your cattle out would be a big education for you.
 

DLD

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Solid colors, even whites, will always outsell roans or red/white marking or even black/white ones (not including baldie or blaze faced ones).  I do understand that there are roans and paints that will perform well, but the problem here is that once a buyer gets burned on some that don't perform, they're really hard to get back.  And most buyers that have been around long have been burned by buying a set of 300# clubby bred Shorthorn colored ones that never grow and/or cripple up when they do.  So next time they find some big framey looking ones, then they couldn't get 'em finished.  Sure there are black ones like that too, but if you say you'll never buy another black one you'd just as well get out of the business 'cause in this part of the world 80% + of the cattle that go through the sale barns are black. 

If you can produce good performing Shorthorn colored cattle and can't get them sold right at the sale barn, then you need to find another way - go together with some other breeders if you don't have enough, but retain ownership on a pen all the way through.  Keep the data (if it's good) and use it to help you and your fellow Shorthorn breeders market your cattle in the future.  If that's not feasible, at least try to find a buyer who will come to your place and look at your calves (and their mama's and daddy's) and see that they have some future - they might give something more than you'd get at a salebarn. 

One bit of advice, try to sell anything that's apt to get discounted when the market is hot - discounts will be alot smaller then than in a softer market.  Also, the bigger they are the less discount for color alone  seems to hold pretty true - if buyers can see performance still in 'em at 900#, that makes 'em a way safer bet for them than 500#'ers.

Edit to add - I was typing (very slowly) while Mark H's reply was posted, but I agree completely with what he said, too.
 
J

JTM

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I took three large cows to town the other day. Two were black and one was solid red with a little white underneath. I know what you should be thinking, well, they definitely shouldn't discount cull cows that aren't black, right? Well no, I got 9 ct less for the red cow even though they were all fat, and she was more moderate. Go figure.
Who has an answer for this one?  ???
 

Okotoks

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Mark H said:
Okotoks,

How big are the groups you are selling?  Are they singles, small groups or pot loads at one time?  Singles or small groups get hammered when sold since aggregating small groups to fill a truck can be a hassle.  Also how uniform are they in terms of size, color, muscle etc. ?
Also cattle that finish to a leaner end point and grow faster are more efficient allowing feeders to pay more for them.  The spread between fatter cattle and leaner finished cattle has narrowed making producing  cattle that produce HRI cattle not an attractive option.   This particularly true in Canada where leaner cattle are preferred.
Lastly, in Alberta shorthorns are not mainstream and if you use breeds that buyers do not normally get orders for you will be relegated into the "buy if it is cheap category". This is the price of doing your own thing in the cattle business.   If you want to see if the dock is justified send the calves to a custom lot-if you have the numbers.  Feeding your cattle out would be a big education for you.
I wasn't talking large numbers in our case. It would be the steers  after we did our final sort on bulls and actually in 2007 and 2008 our calves were at the top of the market the day they sold - except for the couple of red and whites they cut out and docked 20 cents.(One of those calves the one year was the best of the bunch) Sometimes we feed the off collors out and sell them as quarters and halves and we do well on those.
There have been studies that show there is no difference between red hided and black hided on the rail, it's all driven by some expert marketing. Shorthorns marble well and in Canada marbling brings a premium on the rail. We just need to get more bulls out so there are bigger numbers to make pens up. A few years ago Cargill did a study of 300 shorthorn steers and got awesome results. At Western Feedlots the most profitable pen was a group from Jim Scafe one year. The calves came out of rugged terrain up by Dawson Creek. If anyone was looking for Shorthorns that survive and do it in rough country Misty Hills would be a place to look.
 

wrc

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Stillwater Ok
I took 2 heifers to the sale last week.  one was solid black the other black with a white star on her head and 2 white stocking feet.  Both heifers were by the same black clean up bull and out of Meyer 734 cows.  Both heifers were replacement quality heifers but later than the rest of my calves and I decided to let them go.  They weighed exactly the same and the black heifer brought .23 a pound more than the stocking legged heifer.
 

Mark H

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If you confident that the steers out of your bulls feed better than most other steers then you should be able to use that as a marketing tool to sell bulls to commercial breeders.  Offer to your bull customers to buy their calves at a premium, feed them out and then rail them.  When the hide is off they all look alike and the color of their hair is irrelevant.
In doing this you will learn about why feeders offer more for some cattle and not others. 
 

flacowman

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Around here buyers claim that they automatically assume a colored calf has longhorn or dairy breeding.  Any solid colors sell well, especially grays, but our culls out of the small clubby herd always take a hit, which is why we rarely AI to shorthorn bulls...
 

garybob

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flacowman said:
Around here buyers claim that they automatically assume a colored calf has longhorn or dairy breeding.  Any solid colors sell well, especially grays, but our culls out of the small clubby herd always take a hit, which is why we rarely AI to shorthorn bulls...
Horse Feathers! Anyone that says they can't tell a speckled, splotchy-type color pattern of Texas Longhorns from a true, sure-enough roan color in a Shorthorn or Shorthorn cross is lying. Plain, and simple. And, second, everyone knows dairy cattle marble. If an ol'crossbred stock  cow is 1/8 Jersey or 1/4 Holstein, or 1/2 Swiss, and she's bred to a Beef bull (either Angus, or Contiental), her calves won't ....I repeat.... WILL NOT perform any differently on feed, or on the rail, than any of their herdmates who aren't descended from Granpa's ol' Dairy Herd, or Great-Maw's family milk cow (or the Guernsey Nurse cow that traveled to MANY a Hereford show in 1963, or, the Holstein-cross Recip that didn't take her embryo, back in 1989).
Those guys ( southeastern order buyers ) have never spent one minute of time in a feedyard or packing plant. They're thieves, plain and simple. The Ozarks is no different than the Gulf Coast states, in regards to the sale-barn tactics, beliefs, and policies of local order buyers.

GB
 

qbcattle

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hondo, tx
you will docked at the barn for non-uniformity, paints resemble to most as simmental crosses which r known for spending too many days on feed before slaughter, because of the risks due to inconsistency there are going to be discounts. the only way to solve this would be to have a market like the hog market where they pay you based carcass performance rather than on foot. But i dont see the beef industry going to that anytime soon.
 

Silver

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I've never heard of getting docked for black calf with white markings, lots of feedlots like them.
 

DLD

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Silver said:
I've never heard of getting docked for black calf with white markings, lots of feedlots like them.

Black baldies get along great as long as they don't have much white anywhere else, but not black/white paints. 
 
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