Troyer Auction

I’d sure like to make it Scott, but am still up to my ears here calving. Got to start thinking about spring work too. Looks like they have a pile of horses going through. Awful good looking team of bay/brown mules in their. Lucky I’m not going or I’d probably have to sit on my hands hard.

I should mention that some of the news I’ve heard regarding the Madras sale this last weekend was for some with deep pockets – example a #9 high gear mower refurbished went for $4000. Yep, $4000. Ouch.

@Scott G 17671 wrote:

The draft horse market is back! Well…, at least for this sale. Average teams were going for $4-5k. Top team brought about $12k. Many of these teams were work teams, not show hitch teams. Most decent singles were bringing $1.5-2.5k. These prices are 2 to even 3 times what the last couple of years have seen.
…

The guy that I bought the mower from (in the post above) had a team of Percheron geldings for sale. He was asking $4,000.0 for the team. He said he posted his ad on a website on Saturday morning, by noon on Monday they were loaded and gone. He waited a few days and posted an add for a single Perch mare at $2,000.0. It took him about 3 or 4 days to sell her. All 3 animals were well trained and worked regularly. He didn’t say where the geldings went, but the mare went to an 80 year old man in Central Texas that still uses draft horses regularly around his farm. I guess prices have firmed up some, because they weren’t bringing those kind of prices around here a year or so ago.

@J-L 17679 wrote:

Thanks for the report Scott. From looking at the website it seemed like a big sale and I’m a little surprised it held up so well. Also surprising that the mules were out sold, must have been a lot of misguided folks there!

I also cannot figure out folks in this area (including the North slope), at our elevations, who calve so early. When I sell 600# steers off the cow in the fall, very few of the early calvers outweigh mine. Not much advantage there that I can see. Their calves are missing a lot of ears and tails (although I lost a few in early April too).
I think one advantage I have is that my cows have about 3 weeks of green grass under their belt before I breed. I think that tends to flush them, like we used to do with our ewes, with good feed and makes for more fertile heat cycles. Trying to do that in April and early May means your pushing a lot of high dollar feed through them or else you just don’t get the conception or short calving interval that you should have.

Thanks for the compliment.

I think you are dead on correct here. I calf mine the last week of February, and the first couple of weeks in March. Of course our winter is generally over by about the end of the first week of March; wasn’t this year. I try to let those cows get about a month, month and a half or so of spring flush grass in them before I turn out bulls. I think it helps, for exactly the reasons you stated.

Also, in our area we now have people calving cows out in October and even late September to get those mega weaning weights in the early summer. In fact this had become the norm around here, I was one of the few in the area calving at the end of winter. However, I think others are starting to catch on to the fact that a dry cow only needs about 60% of the nutritional requirements of a lactating cow. Come winter time that extra hay and feed comes at a premium, so what are they really gaining by calving so early? Look at nature, few (if any) animals are born in the fall and few if any in the dead of winter. So why would we think we could improve on this model?

A couple younger ranchers around here have “lost” an entire seasons productivity to switch to September calving. One of these operations has 300 cows. I find this interesting; I had the same questions with regards to feed/weather/market etc. I guess a lot has to do with the size of a two year old bull, and the show calf market….
Also, if one has grazing permits you don’t want calves dropping on the mountain.

Another rancher told me he was switching half the herd so he would diversify for both markets…

Im just watching and learning; seems again like yet another distorted supply and demand scenario, when a black angus is worth more at a sale than a red angus….

In S. Indiana, fall calving was the norm, they told me because of the temperate winters and low worm counts on pasture in the winter…

Wow, and all this from some Troyer auction info!:confused:

Kevin

Joel, what crawled up your a–?

I suspect he has a good reason.
That reason may be that is how dad did it.

People do things for plenty of reasons – some good and some not so good or certainly unfounded. TRADITION – just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s still not stupid.

Here’s the thing…he is doing it – you are not

Not for long if he continues to make decisions like that and also, please don’t assume that you know anything about what I do for a living and what I do or don’t know about raising cattle.

why don’t you ask the rancher why it’s done that way?

I did meet him and he said it was totally a marketing decision based on information he got from the beef commission. Fall calving – get on the band wagon.