For the first four years our daughter played basketball my wife and I knew what to expect when we went to her games. She played center and has always been great at defense. When we go to games today, we never know what to expect other than her defense and her basketball IQ are outstanding. On the offensive side she now plays all five positions, mainly power forward and point guard. It is strange to see her go from posting up to dribbling, directing traffic and draining threes. It confuses other teams as well which throws the door wide open for her to rack up assists in a game, too.

Watching these games and the switches that take place makes me grin on the inside because it is just like sell/buy marketing. We can implement it to do stocker to stocker trades never selling the same sell weight or replacing with the same buy weight each time. We can even at times switch sexes selling heifers and replacing with males, and back the other way. We can also sell stockers and buy bred females. Trade different ages and periods of gestation, including pairs, for a while before trading breeding stock back to stockers.

With legit sell/buy marketing we only have a basic fundamental way to analyze the market to see what we can and can not do right now in order to prosper ourselves. Just like the team my daughter plays with, offense puts points on the board and defense is what wins them tournament championship medals. Our offense is being aggressive and turning over inventory at a profit. Our defense is knowing when not to sell certain animals in our inventory, which prevents us from losing money.

Related:Stick to the facts and sell/buy

Mastering the basics

This brings me to the next myth I am going to bust. Some people are telling others that my marketing schools cover the basics, and another school teaches an advanced level of marketing. First off thank you for saying I teach the basics and make it simple to understand, because that is all there is. It is a myth that there is an advanced level.

I pulled out my book from when I attended Ann Barnhardt’s school half a lifetime ago and I was reading my notes. In the middle of them I wrote this line “Must review basics of marketing constantly there is no advanced marketing.”  Since I wrote that down that means she said it. For decades now all I have done is review and practice the basics and that is what allowed me to grow my business from scratch to a full-time endeavor, which got me noticed and eventually led to being pushed to teach legit sell/buy to others.

With the National Finals Rodeo on right now y’all know I am watching the bull riding. I haven’t seen a rider show off some advanced level of riding yet. We have seen some great rides and every one of them was an awesome display of mastering the basics. If we stick with the basketball theme it is well known that Kobe became one of the best of all time. He is known for outworking everyone else in the league. Here’s the thing, he didn’t practice advanced tactics, he practiced the basics repeatedly. He didn’t practice them to get them right, he practiced them until he could not get them wrong.

Related:Strong calf prices finish the year

Some may ask if there is not an advanced level then what was Ann’s level two school about? In that school she changed the proxy. She taught that so that if the economy imploded and we end up on a bartering system to market we could be sure we are still executing prosperous trades. It was also full of common pitfalls people run into and she addressed those. Many of those pitfalls she addressed people are still falling for today. I address these issues in my schools because it falls on my shoulders to prove why some material people are putting out fails. If we look at it this way I am teaching the basics and the advanced all at once.

Debunking the "five-year old and out" myth

Related:Can the commercial cow herd benefit from reproductive strategies?

That leads me to the next myth which is the five-year-old and out program, or the no depreciation cow herd. This is a cookie cutter recipe which common sense tells us won’t work. In a legit sell/buy school the point of relationships should be driven hard and that we do not let a scale, which is target weights, or a calendar, which is target dates, dictate what we do. This bogus ideal of selling at a certain age is deflecting marketing responsibility onto the calendar. Back to the basketball theme, this would be like a team being one dimensional which makes them easy to beat because they back themselves into a corner by not utilizing skills.

Several people have reached out to me to disprove this theory. I thought it was easy to see, as I have written on here repeatedly that when we bell curve cow prices by age, using the same body condition and stage of pregnancy we see that almost half of the depreciation takes place between ages 4 and 5. That all by itself disproves it.

That market fact alone was not good enough for these guys and they wanted me to go into more detail. So, I did and what I discovered I will share in upcoming blogs.

The first thing I noticed, and admittedly was embarrassing to me because I didn’t catch this years ago when the cozener showed me this recipe, was that he increased the stocking rate 20 to 30% (depending on which book we look at). How can one do this if the ranch is already running at capacity? This implies that the operation will have to lease or purchase more land. This is not disclosed in one of the books I have, and in the other book it is called a “slight increase.”  Those of us who actually raise cattle know this is not a slight increase and will have a cost.

Costs are left out of the examples in the cozener’s material. His examples also assume 100% of the heifers kept will remain in the herd until sold at age 5 and they will have a 100% weaning rate. Many people mention listening to podcasts, or new media if they’re trying to get around mentioning podcasts. When I ask if these people heard the slip up of “manipulating the numbers” they all admit they missed that.  Details matter folks. The razor’s edge is in the details and that razor’s edge might as well be a mile wide sometimes.

Another thing I noticed when going back through those examples that I embarrassedly missed the first few times is the balance sheet. For those who are unaware of this bogus recipe you are blessed to have never seen it because you don’t have to get the idea out of your head. It is designed to increase gross sales and improve the balance sheet.

First let me address the increase in gross sales. Revenue feeds the ego, and profit feeds the family. I will get more detailed about that in upcoming posts. Then there is the huge error on the balance sheet. The sale of the five-year-old cows is included in the gross sales and their value is also included on the balance sheet. My banker must be a lot different than his because I guarantee you all that he would correct that and take the cows sold off the balance sheet. This delivers a huge blow to the increase in herd valuation when corrected.

Current markets

The Value of Gain is higher in the northern plains. Heifers have a more attractive VOG than steers this week. The VOG does taper off on the heavier weights. Prices in the northern plains are higher than elsewhere making geographical spreads attractive to buyers. The roll back between steers and heifers is something some people may want to give some consideration to.

This week feeder bulls were up to 25 back and unweaned calves were 10 back. Replacement quality females are catching a $15 premium. Feeder heifers are undervalued to fats. Location matters when finding undervalued feeder steers compared to fats.

Female markets held their trend this week. The first calf heifer and 3-4-year-olds are battling it out to see who will be the top of the bell curve. Then there is that dramatic drop in price for the five-year-olds. The price drops only slightly from there until they are called short solid or broken mouth.

An interesting thing I saw late summer is happening again right now. The price difference between a 3-in-1 pair to a bred cow is greater than the value of the calf. Here’s how I see this. The producer that sells the 3-in-1 and replaces with the bred did a better job marketing the calf. I say this because if that producer weaned the calf it would not bring as much as the price difference between the pair and the bred.

We are getting a ton of interest in the March school in North Dakota with Mary Jo Irmen. If you want in that one, get registered soon. We also have a school in Nebraska in February. Marketing Schools – Mr Cattlemaster

I understand travel can be an issue and there is a solution to that. Order Ann Barnhardt’s DVD set either for yourself or as a Christmas gift for a loved one: Ann Barnhardt’s Cattle Marketing DVD Set | Barnhardt