Latimer, Iowa (north central) | Profits?? :-) 9% interest.... In the years I was involved with the financials and the 40 years our family feeding cattle at a large scale for Iowa.... Custom feeding consistently paid the bills, owning our own was boom and bust. Did alot of both. "make it up on the next pen" "gotta buy and sell in the same market" "made money on every head we owned, just didn't value the corn very high sometimes"
Did close outs on 23,200 head we owned through our lot from 2004-2013. If corn/silage price was determined at what corn could be sold for the 1st of June every year (when I seasonally presell corn to ethanol plants or the board) and paid ourselves custom rate for yardage, (been a bit but remembering 17 cents a day), we averaged losing $73.14 per head. Fed everything from blacks from Superior to salebarn specials from Zumbrota. The way to make money that I see is to do something different on feed and be able to take advantage of feed opportunities that present themselves. If you are selling your own corn through feed to the cattle, it only makes sense to use a June 1st presell price vs whatever the corn price is when the cattle eat the corn. Opportunity cost of the corn needs to be considered and not many custom owners or farmer feeders will be willing to do that.
100 head is going to have a hard time justifying the needed equipment. If you love cattle its great, if not.... There is a reason most of the 100-2000 head lots are empty. We have an empty one ourselves and I like cattle. |
Custom rate
