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SE MT | Still have mixed feelings on selling on superior versus sale barn. We lose some flexibility in our season if we are contracted to ship say October 10 and we run into severe drought, grasshoppers, or hail like we have seen the past half dozen years. and it changes conditions drastically.
The one year we did it we contracted 2/3 the calves, spent half of a day having them run up and down the alley be sorted for size to make weight. Then still had to load the other third of the calves and take them to the sale barn.
It seems like you may get a premium on the calves contracted, but will get docked on the bigs and littles that you have to end up taking to the sale barn anyway. So you in turn de-value those calves because they are not usually semi load lots of like kinds.
The sale barn has done a great job the last few years sorting up calves by size and hitting the load weights dead on. The big gamble with the sale barns has always been if the market dropped drastically that day/week. But with the invention of LRP, that concern is no longer a largely damaging one.
The funny thing is when you talk to the guys that sell their calves contracted they always tell you what their calves contracted price was, but they won’t tell what the average is after they took the rest of their stuff that they didn’t contract to the sale barn. I’m betting it is pretty close to what the guys make that take their stuff to the sale barn exclusively….
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Selling on superior vs. salebarn
