The pinnacle of the Giefer Ranch year is the annual production sale. Two weeks after Thanksgiving, we sell “long yearling” bulls and weanling heifers. The process begins more than two years before the sale with careful determination of matings. After the calves are born, conformation and disposition are continually evaluated.
In the months preceding the sale, ads are developed and placed in the national breed journal, state and local newspapers, and regional magazines. Photographs are taken of each animal. Pedigree and EPD inserts are obtained from the breed association. The sale catalog is designed and sent to the printers. Radio ads are recorded and sent. The last weeks before the sale are a frenzy of breeding soundness exams, baking cookies, ironing the crew’s white button-down shirts, delivering wood chips to the salebarn, making sure I’m up to date on writing veterinary interstate certificates.
In short, it’s a lot of work.
Our average annual rainfall is twenty-two inches. In the past year, we’ve gotten just over nine. Last year’s hay crop was a total loss. We didn’t put up a single bale. A June fire consumed half our stored hay. For a commercial breeder, drought is tough. For purebred breeders like us, selling the cow herd means losing a twenty-plus-year investment in genetic selection. So far, we’ve managed to keep most of the cows. But by mid-January of this year, it was obvious we had to come up with Plan B for the calves.
Buying hay was not an option. Prices were outrageous; trucking was untenable. To avoid selling the bulls that would comprise our 2023 December sale, we moved them to the “Pond Pasture” where they ate stockpiled grass. By early April, they had grubbed the forage and were starting to push fences. We built temporary fence around last year’s failed milo crop. It wasn’t the best quality feed, but it kept them going for a while. We brainstormed for the next option. Graze the tree row? The lawn? The road ditches? Send them to a custom feedlot until the sale and incur perhaps a thousand dollars a head in feed costs? With the current market making them more valuable on the hoof today than their year-older brothers were last December, that didn’t seem a viable option.
This morning, after months of deliberation, I hauled the bulls to the salebarn.
On the one hand, it seems like an easy out to avoid the work of putting on a sale and the sleepless nights figuring out how to get them through until December.
On the other hand, a production sale is heavily based on reputation. If we skip a sale, will the buyers return next year?
In my head, I know it was the right decision. That didn’t keep me from choking down a lump this morning as I watched those lightweight young bulls hop off the same trailer their big brothers lumbered out of last December.
Every drought ends. As I write this, it’s raining. The precipitation won’t save this year’s sale, but like the grass of the High Plains, we will rebound.
