Beef Cattle Question

[retrieverman]

i can sum up your question in a few words. "the money you will earn in the cow industry is the money you don't spend".

sorry re read your post and have a better answer. build a pen with water tank and room for a few head. maybe .5 acre or so. go to okc west of tulsa or the local salebarn and buy a steer or bull calf about 600 lbs or more. bring home put in pen and feed some medium quality hay with some alfalfa flake or two or protien. a little corn until about 1200 lbs and haul to the butcher. watch the poop and keep it looking about like a pumpkin pie and not runny or hard turds and you will be ok. if the turds start to stack up add protien or alfalfa gradually until it loosens up and keep it there. figure about 3 lbs per day gain.

 

[2busy]

If your'e putting a few head in a half acre, your'e going to have a mud hole that wont quit especially if you feed hay in there also. Do not feed out bulls. Steers or heifers will be a better end product. Testosterone is not your friend in a meat animal. Yea they will muscle up but won't have much fat reserves to help produce a tender cut of meat during the cooking process.

 

[HFS]

If your'e putting a few head in a half acre, your'e going to have a mud hole that wont quit especially if you feed hay in there also. Do not feed out bulls. Steers or heifers will be a better end product. Testosterone is not your friend in a meat animal. Yea they will muscle up but won't have much fat reserves to help produce a tender cut of meat during the cooking process.

That's what I thought also, for eating you want a steer instead of a bull.
I'm no bovine expert but I've always heard you need to get his mind off of chasing a-- and onto eating grass.

 

[Snattlerake]

Ha! Obvoiusly a lot will go into just raising 2-3 beef cattle for the freezer and if it ends up being too much of a time suck then just purchasing a half could be an option. We would do this for 3- 4 families. If it is too much then we do one "season" and then cut it off.

Don't write me off as a BFF just yet. I plan on a lot a acreage and i know how valuable good hunting land can be in OK.

Which half you want?

 

[ConstitutionCowboy]

40 years ago my grand dad told me he couldn't make it if he had a land payment.

Think about that for a minute.

You're in a production business, but in order to make money, someone has to give you your most valuable and expensive raw material.

He wasn't a rancher. He grew wheat, cotton and beans and bought calves in the fall to run on the wheat and sold them in the spring. I don't know how a guy could make it these days in a cow/calf operation. It would be difficult. The land we inherited, we lease to a cousin, and he farms it and winters a few calves. I come from a farming family, but those guys are all dead now. It's a lot easier to make money doing something else, and I never knew any of them or the neighbors that did it for the money. It was a way of life and a lifestyle. They weren't in it because it was making them rich. The "rich" came from the mineral rights underneath the surface. It's the way they were able to sustain the farms. Without the O&G money, they probably would have lost the land they inherited back to the bank. It's a tough business, and it's a tough life.

This calls to mind something else that gets in the way of small farming and some other businesses that get handed down: Inheritance taxes. Inventory taxes are another killer.

Woody

 

[CHenry]

This calls to mind something else that gets in the way of small farming and some other businesses that get handed down: Inheritance taxes. Inventory taxes are another killer.

Woody

what?

 

[TerryMiller]

This calls to mind something else that gets in the way of small farming and some other businesses that get handed down: Inheritance taxes. Inventory taxes are another killer.

Woody

I certainly know about the inheritance taxes, but is the "inventory tax" something new? That I've never heard about. While retail businesses have inventory taxes, I didn't think farmers/ranchers had one to deal with.

 

[ConstitutionCowboy]

I certainly know about the inheritance taxes, but is the "inventory tax" something new? That I've never heard about. While retail businesses have inventory taxes, I didn't think farmers/ranchers had one to deal with.

Maybe not ranchers and farmers so much, but small - and even large - businesses pay a property or inventory tax. Here in Oklahoma, it is both. This does hinder business because if a business has the wherewithal to create an inventory that could keep them in business for years to come while paying all the production costs in the current year, the business gets taxed for whatever inventory remains from year to year which adds cost to what those items must be sold for to keep up with profit margins.

I mentioned the inventory tax anecdotally. It's the reason a lot of retailers have those "clearance" sales at or near the end of their fiscal year.

Woody

 

[BReeves]

I delt with the inventory tax in my business by not buying anything till it was sold. Never had any inventory, not all businesses can do that, was lucky enough to be in one that could.

 

[Snattlerake]

My uncle had to by a new tractor because he depreciated his Minneapolis Moline to 0 and couldn't keep farming with it.
That's what he told everybody.