justintime said:
So my question is: what are you planning for your herd? Are you planning to expand, decrease cow numbers or sell out?
Your post on another thread with the high prices reminded me of this question you asked last summer. I watched some of the recent production sales online and they have been impressive. I was told (and in my experience it's true) that the purebred industry lags the commercial industry in prices both going up and down. The current market is the strongest it has been in years. It's obviously unusual as everyone (including myself) seems amazed by the rapid rise. In 2002 we started to see good strength in the market and one cow with BSE turned that upside down in June 2003. Knowing how quickly things can change we are not increasing our numbers this year, in fact we have used the strong commercial market to tidy up the bottom end of our herd and also to send a group of older cows to town where they brought great salvage value. Hopefully the prices we are seeing are the beginning of a sustained trend in the market but we will be calving fewer cows next year.
