A day at the Sale.

[Big Muddy rancher]

Sounds like you sit bout where I do when I go LOL

Do you stay for the calves or just for the horses? I always have to work my way to that spot, because it's the best view of the calves so I can grade them before they go on the scale. Does Pete pick on you? I used to listen to him in Nacogdoches every Thursday to. He is a mess.

You mention about grading the calves before they go on the scale.But your sitting in the stands. :?

I live in Canada and at any yard I have been at the cattle are weighed BEFORE they are sold.When selling calves most are presorted.(Weighed in to multi owner groups before the sale to make load lots or at least larger groups. 2,200 feeders sold in Weyburn on Monday in a little over 3 hours.That was in -20 degree temps for the yard crew working mostly outside. The part under cover is sometimes colder.

 

[the_jersey_lilly_2000]

Sounds like you sit bout where I do when I go LOL

Do you stay for the calves or just for the horses? I always have to work my way to that spot, because it's the best view of the calves so I can grade them before they go on the scale. Does Pete pick on you? I used to listen to him in Nacogdoches every Thursday to. He is a mess.

I can sit there all day long. Been that way since I was a lil girl goin to the sales with my daddy.
I don't know who Pete is. Or at least if I do...I don't know him by name.
Hubby don't care to sit there all day, even if we are sellin. Not his thang. He's got other things he'd rather be doin. But I love goin.

Yeap ya'll, they sell one at a time, go thru the ring, then out the gate and onto the scales. After they are weighed, they have a monitor above that gate, that displays their weight. I've been to sales there that started at 11 am, and wasn't over with til 2 or 3 am. Been a while since I been to one that lasted that long....

 

[the_jersey_lilly_2000]

I will take some photo's next time I am there. Most of the markets here are similar to yours inside except for the comfy stadium seats. There are armchairs for the main buyers at the ring. The ring is bigger, could hold 40 700lb calves. All the stock stays outside (that's why I asked) Max capacity 2500-3000 hd. We have in Alberta several Auctions. I am within two hours of four markets. Closest one is 6 miles away.

I wish we sold in lot loads here. We sale one at a time, the auctioneer can sale 300-400 per hr when we are cruising. I laugh when my boss comes to sit with me he can't tell what calf they are selling they are going so fast. I always ask him if he wants to do the market report here. He said no way you just do it. :lol: :lol:

You sell one calf at a time!? 300 to 400 an hour? They sell that in 10 minutes here.

But are they sellin one at a time?

 

[Big Muddy rancher]

Are the cattle in Texas so mixed up that they have to sell one at a time?

Why do they bother weighing them if you guess the weight when you buy why not just sell them by the dollar?

 

[Blkbuckaroo]

I can't understand why they sell one at a time,that would be one lengthy sale.

 

[Trinity man]

The cattle here in East Texas are so uneven in weight, color, and breed it's hard to put pkg together. The larger ranch down here normally sale directly to feed lots or they do the video sales. But we do get some of them that come though the sale in the fall that we sale in lot loads.
Yes they do weight the cattle after they are sold. The buyers have to be pretty good at est. weight, but not all of the sale down here sale this away. Yes it does take along time when we have 4 or 5 thousand. Two years ago we had a bad drought and it took from 12:00pm to 8:00am to sale that many. They normally get 2 or 3 auctioneers to come in to help out on the big runs.
I always try to sit on the scale side they have a little pen before the hit the scale so I can get a good look at them before they go on. I grade calves as 1, 2, or 3 on the USDA grading standards, sex, and weight. Slaughter cows as Breakers, Boners, and Lean and bulls as avg. yielding, high yielding and low yielding. Doing this makes for some long days and nights in tracking these prices.

 

[Big Muddy rancher]

Why weigh after they are sold. They have already determined what they are going to pay so why not just sell by dollars/hd?

We have a presort sale that the cattle are weighed and sorted into pens the day before the sale. They are weighed off truck and pencil shrunk. There is still enough to sell single as of course they all don't have a mate but they do manage to put some pretty even groups together. Helps the buyer figure what is there to make loads up for different orders.

Could anybody give me a good reason not to weigh the cattle before they are sold?

 

[Trinity man]

Why weigh after they are sold. They have already determined what they are going to pay so why not just sell by dollars/hd?

We have a presort sale that the cattle are weighed and sorted into pens the day before the sale. They are weighed off truck and pencil shrunk. There is still enough to sell single as of course they all don't have a mate but they do manage to put some pretty even groups together. Helps the buyer figure what is there to make loads up for different orders.

Could anybody give me a good reason not to weigh the cattle before they are sold?

It's just the way they do it down here. The reason why the sale them by the lb. is because the buyers base there prices off the futures on the CME and they don't do futures by the hd. Most of the cattle that are sold are brought in the day of the sale. So they don't have any shrink on them at all, but sometimes the calves may have been though a pre-condition program at the ranch they come from. For example, Tuesday sale had about 200 hd that was pre-condition, but they still sold them one at a time. Don't ask me why, I thought that was a little crazy to me. :?

 

[Big Muddy rancher]

Why weigh after they are sold. They have already determined what they are going to pay so why not just sell by dollars/hd?

We have a presort sale that the cattle are weighed and sorted into pens the day before the sale. They are weighed off truck and pencil shrunk. There is still enough to sell single as of course they all don't have a mate but they do manage to put some pretty even groups together. Helps the buyer figure what is there to make loads up for different orders.

Could anybody give me a good reason not to weigh the cattle before they are sold?

It's just the way they do it down here. The reason why the sale them by the lb. is because the buyers base there prices off the futures on the CME and they don't do futures by the hd. Most of the cattle that are sold are brought in the day of the sale. So they don't have any shrink on them at all, but sometimes the calves may have been though a pre-condition program at the ranch they come from. For example, Tuesday sale had about 200 hd that was pre-condition, but they still sold them one at a time. Don't ask me why, I thought that was a little crazy to me. :?

But you don't know why they don't weigh them before they are sold?

 

[Trinity man]

I tell you what I will hunt you up an answer Tuesday when I am back iat the sale. :wink:

 

[Nicky]

At ours they only sort lots out of one owners cattle, the scale is under the ring, so they come in, the weight comes up and bidding starts.

 

[per]

At ours they only sort lots out of one owners cattle, the scale is under the ring, so they come in, the weight comes up and bidding starts.

That is how it works here and if there are 40 or 100 calves that fit in the package they will run batches of whatever will fit on the scale through and then sell all of them at once. Speeds the sale up and is good for the price as order buyers can fill loads up fast.

 

[RSL]

Any auction of feeders here they tell you the sex, head count, total pen weight and usually average weight. If the buyers split a calf out of the pen it is singled off and weighed before it comes back in the ring.
The only per head deals are purebred/breeding sales, bred cows or the odd dispersal.
Presorts are a big deal in our part of the world, and some auctions only do presorts. We truck our cattle south and sell as our own. since we try to do a lot of value adding, we don't really want to sell with other calves.
When I was in Australia, I saw a big yard where the buyers walk down the alley between the pens and the auctioneer moves down the catwalk as each pen is sold. They herd the buyers rather than the cattle.
I guess there are a million different ways to get the same thing done.

 

[Trinity man]

Any auction of feeders here they tell you the sex, head count, total pen weight and usually average weight. If the buyers split a calf out of the pen it is singled off and weighed before it comes back in the ring.
The only per head deals are purebred/breeding sales, bred cows or the odd dispersal.
Presorts are a big deal in our part of the world, and some auctions only do presorts. We truck our cattle south and sell as our own. since we try to do a lot of value adding, we don't really want to sell with other calves.
When I was in Australia, I saw a big yard where the buyers walk down the alley between the pens and the auctioneer moves down the catwalk as each pen is sold. They herd the buyers rather than the cattle.
I guess there are a million different ways to get the same thing done.

I talked to a guy from Australia at a beef cattle short course at Texas A&M. He had a ranch in the southern part and had to truck his cattle to the northern part to market them. He said it was a major pain, becauce of going though the middle of Australia. He said there was no place to market his cattle in the southern parts. Do they still have to do this?

 

[per]

We also use the Internet and satellite to sell cattle. The weight is estimated and the pen is filmed and cattle are sold with a slide of some sort and a pencil shrink. You have a few seconds to say yes or no. I like this method but haven't used it for a few years.

 

[RSL]

Oz is quite different for a few reasons. They export almost everything and they range from smaller bos taurus operations in the south to huge bos indicus in the north. I toured an auction just south of Queensland. In Queensland they couldn't understand how anyone could make a living with less than 20,000 cows. It is quite different to do pasture management by looking at sattelite images and trying to pick out where the brush fires are. They were even planting trees for grazing. I will try to dig through my old pics and post these up for interest sake.

 

[Trinity man]

Oz is quite different for a few reasons. They export almost everything and they range from smaller bos taurus operations in the south to huge bos indicus in the north. I toured an auction just south of Queensland. In Queensland they couldn't understand how anyone could make a living with less than 20,000 cows. It is quite different to do pasture management by looking at sattelite images and trying to pick out where the brush fires are. They were even planting trees for grazing. I will try to dig through my old pics and post these up for interest sake.

How in the world do you look after 20,000 hd. :shock:

 

[Yanuck]

RSL where abouts in Queensland were you at?