I wrote last week I’d be doing some myth busting the remainder of the year. I didn’t think one of them would be to bust an internet rumor about my family. My wife is still alive, and all our schools that we have scheduled are still a go. In fact, she has been busy this week trying to schedule more schools in 2025.

On the Mr. CattleMaster Facebook page, I posted a link to the webinar I was on this week. There are some good nuggets in there. My favorite part was the difference in mindset and collision of paradigms.

Current cattle market dynamics

This week in the markets feeders were mixed. This caused the value of gain to be mixed compared to last week. Even with that in play the VOG is signaling this remains a weight gain business.

Several factors were in play this week. Multiple load lots fetched a few dollars more than load lots. Unweaned calves were up to 10 back, while feeder bulls were up to 50 back.

With higher cattle prices and cheaper feed costs, some buckled to the temptation to creep feed their calves and as a result took a $15 discount. The extra weight gained from creep, coupled with the discount made this about a break-even practice when factoring in the cost of the feed. We must know the market we are selling in to and sell our customers what they want to buy.

Related:Stick to the facts and sell/buy

To me, wearing that brand new feed company hat was free advertising for them. If we’re going to advertise someone else’s product I think we should be getting paid to do so.

On the female side of the business, I noticed that some USDA reporters are finally segregating by trimester instead of lumping two trimesters together. This makes these reports more meaningful. For the reporters still lumping them, get with the program.

On the pair side of things, depreciation was not very noticeable. Heifer to 4-year-old pairs were only $300 more than short solid pairs. Depreciation was noticeable on second period females. And what stood out was the drop in price between 4- and 5-year-olds. One trip around the sun cost $600. From there on it was a slow and steady decline in price. Cows in the third took little depreciation in price until the broken mouth cows, making these one and dones a good buy. First period females have no fans.

Value-added cattle marketing

My definition of value-added marketing is: It is only value added if we capture the added value. The Show-Me-Select bred heifer sales in Missouri are great at doing this. While some only brought $2,500, there were quite a few that were between $3,000 and $4,500.

Related:Strong calf prices finish the year

Age is doing little to set up relationships, while it is stage of pregnancy and body condition that is creating the opportunity to prosper.

I don’t spend much time on social media. As evidenced above, it is full of misinformation. I would venture to guess that it was buzzing about the nearly $2,000 replacement five weights. Most five weight replacements are a great buy, even against pound cows. However, in this case, two people were bidding like drunk monkeys and bid all the profit potential out of them.

Cattle marketing myths

I need to live at the sale barn to be a sell/buy marketer. This is not true. In the beginning of my career, I didn’t own many cattle and was still trading time off the farm for dollars. At that point my time was better spent working for someone else.

What we do need to know is what is going on in the markets weekly, especially in our local sale barns. Some sale barns do a lousy job reporting their markets, therefore we must have local knowledge in order to make sense of those reports.

I also realize that not everyone is equipped to be a buyer. Developing a relationship with an order buyer is one way to handle this. I know some outstanding sell/buy marketers that rely heavily on order buyers and have great success. Between market reports and communication with their buyers, they are highly aware of what is happening in their area.

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

If I buy at a sale barn, I am buying someone else’s problem. What I just heard was I shouldn’t buy your cattle. That line always gets them back peddling fast. So what if it is someone else’s problem? A great entrepreneur takes someone else’s problem and fixes it. There is good money to be made cleaning up cosmetics and settling a wild cow.

There is conventional knowledge that has been passed down about health wrecks. You can see this on the video I mentioned above. I have only had health wrecks on the stocker side of my operation.

I told a guy yesterday at the sale I was at that the feed yards are appreciative of what we do. It is the cow/calf operations that don’t have any appreciation for the stocker operations. Not because they are stuck up – many just have no clue what happens beyond dropping them off at the point of sale.

I have never experienced any health wrecks on the breeding stock side of my operation. My breed back percentages have always been higher than the closed herds in my area. I must confess I run more bull power than most of us think is required. I also haven’t had any calving issues to speak of.

My money is undervalued so I should hang onto it. The money is not undervalued. There is no way it could be since it is a proxy. If the economy imploded and we are in a third-world bartering system to market these animals, the proxy could easily change to something else. The only thing in question here is our perception of the proxy.

If we sell an undervalued animal, then it makes the money we received for that animal appear undervalued. Therefore, we simply avoid selling undervalued animals. We do this by not selling an animal until we have the replacement identified.

I will be blunt. This money undervalued nonsense is being taught by people who do not practice sell/buy marketing. When I was growing up, I remember my elders belittling those who taught something they didn’t practice. I am fully aware of the old essay about money being undervalued and if we read it to understand it, what it said was what I wrote above – don’t  sell undervalued animals.

It has become clear to me that teaching the money undervalued nonsense is an escape hatch for being a lousy instructor. This allows them to deflect responsibility and give their students a manufactured excuse, to hold onto it and begin again with a virgin buy.

In 20 years of implementing sell/buy marketing, I have never been in a situation where my money was perceived to be undervalued because I have always been able to find a buy back against what I sold. In that time period, I have seen people implement this excuse and take massive inventory valuation losses, and miss out on opportunities to prosper.

Time value of money

Then there is the time value of money. TVM means the sooner we take a profit, the sooner we can reinvest and be well on our way to capturing the next profit. When I was young and beginning, I never heard of TVM. Over years of successfully implementing sell/buy, I came to understand it by osmosis. This led me to become an aggressive marketer. TVM is a big focal point in other investment areas.

With sell/buy we capture the profit on the buy. Stopping the process midstream makes no sense. With sell/buy, it used to be a belief that today is the best day to buy because there is always something undervalued in the offering. I believe that because I have lived it. With legit sell/buy, our exposure to market risk is the time between the sell and the buy. Stopping midstream opens us up to more risk. I do not understand why people don’t catch that the people who spread this nonsense are talking out of both sides of their mouth.

In the coming weeks I will address the nonsense of the no depreciation cow theory, repeated virgin buys, advanced levels of sell/buy, looking back to be forward thinking (which I lightly touched on in the video from this week’s webinar) and how some people are giving up their control. Legit sell/buy marketing ensures we retain control.