Our processors have gone up 10 cents a pound in the last short while. It was good timing to raise prices I reckon.
The packer we use has only gone up $10/head on the kill fee.
Every packer around here is booked up. We had to wait 8 weeks to get ours in, and the guy is now already booked solid through October. He has a huge deer processing clientele, so he’s not booking any cattle or pigs from November to January. Over the years, the USDA has squeezed nearly all the packers out in my area of East Texas, and the few that are left can barely keep up.
So let me get this worked out in my noggin.....we have a meat shortage and the local processors are booked months out for individual sales and processing. That sounds like a win for the buyer but sucks for the producers unless the ranchers are getting into the ranch to table thing I'm hearing about. (it's what we used to do back in the day. Buy from a local and process it)
Pretty weird ain’t it. The owner here and I were talking a few days ago about the pros and cons of changing up how we do things. May just try to cut all the middlemen out. Raise em here, feed em all the way to finishing, slaughter em and sell em. It’d be a bunch of work and take some planning. Might just try a few first instead of our entire calf crop. We sell about 600 calves a year. That’d be way too many to experiment.
I’ve got a friend in the show steers business, and he also buys finished steers after the shows to have them processed for people. I’m not sure what he profits from doing it, but I think he’s mainly trying to help folks that want to have one done but don’t have the “ability” to facilitate the process themselves. With all the major shows and many of the county steer shows in Texas being cancelled, there was a HUGE number of finished steers on the market this spring, but from what I’ve heard lately, the supply has pretty much dried up.
