Well, I don't really know if Share cows really are all that bad. A lot depends on your exact deal. BUT, if you actually put it to paper....
If you buy 10 cows at $1000 each and take a loan out to pay them off over 5 years.
Your principal payment is going to be $2000 and if I figured it right your interest will be say $500. So, that is a $2500 total payment.
Now, if you take cows on shares, with a 60/40 split. Say your calves average $500 (which they have around here the last couple years). So, those calves bring in $5000. 40% of that is $2000.
Now, that is certainly not as much as if you were paying that loan out.
Plus, you have to figure that you are going to have to cull and replace some cows.
When you own them, that is all going to come out of your own pocket.
When we've had share cattle, replacements were the responsibility of the owner, and we got back BRED cows. If a cow died, we had the vet post them, just to cover our butts, and so long as she didn't die from negligence (read starvation etc) the owners also replaced her.
We've also done it on a lease basis, where we paid the owner a set amount every year. Usually that works out to about whatever the payment would have been per cow if you had bought them on a 5 year loan, or maybe a bit less.
Some other things to think about with a cow share/lease agreement are
-who supplies bulls
-who pays med./vet costs
We've had them both ways as far as bulls go. We've supplied and the owners have supplied. If you want to keep heifers, then probably you want to choose your own bulls, if the calves are all being sold, maybe it doesn't matter so much.
All the agreements we've had, vet costs were ours, but I have heard agreements where the owner shared in vet costs.
Whatever the case, I would insist that the cows need to be pregchecked at the owners expense or have a calf at foot before they arrive at your farm.