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Show 49 and everybody wants to go to the auction so they're selling at $ 400 a pair. If I could keep them for three months, the calves themselves under normal condition would bring me $ 500 a piece and I would still have the cows. But I can't keep them. They're on the verge of dying or are dying, so I have to do something with them." The next guy I talked to had a herd of about 400 head of cattle and he said, " To this point I have had 21 head die. I'm feeding $ 400 a day with the hay and I'm losing money every day. If I sell my cattle today they will not pay what I owe on the cattle and I'll still have the mortgage on the farm." I have a neighbor who has a range, a nice pasture both to the north and south of me. He needed to move his cattle the other day through my pasture to get to his higher country where he thought he might have some more feed for his cows. I do know that he has been spending $ 200 a day on feeding the cattle in that pasture. And yet as he tried to move them from one pasture to the next, two of them died on my pasture because they didn't have the strength to go on through to get to the next pasture. I started, as I said, I have been in the cattle business all my life, but 20 years ago I determined that I wanted to build a special herd, a special herd of livestock that had characteristics and genetics that I wanted in my herd, and so hired some professional help and I began doing an artificial insemination program where I was getting certain genetics out of certain bulls across the United States and putting them into my herd to build them up to the point that some of the local cattle buyers have told me that that's the best looking herd of Black Angus cattle in the State of Utah. However, if I am forced to sell them at this point, or if they die, then that 20 years will be gone. To give you an example of how dry it really is in Southern Utah, this year in the fall of the year, as we always do, we planted 250 acres of rye. Now, some people in our area consider rye as a weed because rye grows sometimes when it's not wanted and you can't hardly get rid of it. But it is a good early spring green crop for the cattle. So I planted the 250 acres last fall, expecting that this spring I would have that green feed. Usually you can always depend on some storm in the winter and very little storm will germinate rye. This spring I have not seen one green shoot out of that rye. So, wondering if there was something else wrong, I had gone through that field on my hands and knees and dug up many, many of the seeds, and some of the seeds I find have sprouted and sprouted just barely, not enough to get through the ground, but just enough to show the seed was good and the seed would have grown had there been moisture. But I don't have a green stalk on that 250 acres that was planted last fall that should have germinated through the winter. The big problem that cattlemen are facing in our area this year is that right now is the breeding season. They are not only going to be in trouble with what they have to do to survive this year but next year they are not going to have a calf crop, because the cattle are too poor to breed and they're not going to get a calf crop next year. |
