30 Follow us on Twitter: @PrairieFarming Better Farming | February 2024 “You’re over $300 a head in interest expense alone by Year 2 of raising a heifer calf into a cow,” Copithorne says. Shawn Cabak, Manitoba Agriculture’s forage and livestock specialist, says that when prices for calves are high, maximizing calf sales is a sound strategy to capture profits. If a producer instead tried building a cow herd now, there would be no guarantee of selling the extra calves at 2023-like highs because they couldn’t be sold for two years at the earliest, Cabak says. And a lot can happen to cattle markets in two years. He anticipates there will still be heifers retained, by producers who want to maintain their cow numbers but not necessarily increase them – part of normal culling practices and improving the cow herd. “Reducing the culling rate now is a way of calving a few more cows and being able to sell those calves next year at hopefully still-high prices,” Cabak says. “This works best if culling was current up to now and the overall cow herd is younger.” Supply crunch Other factors behind heifers going to feedlots include demographics and labour shortages. “The average age of a farmer is near 60, and older farmers don’t like calving heifers anymore. It is a young person’s game,” Copithorne says. Cabak agrees that farmers close to retirement aren’t looking to expand, and says the high prices they’ve seen induced them to cut back and sell. As for labour, Copithorne says finding people is challenging, and the shortages are stymieing those farmers who want to expand their operations or grow their herds. As a result of all these issues, North American supply conditions are extremely tight, and will remain that way until 2026 – at minimum, he says. “It takes two years to develop heifers into cows, and we haven’t even begun to hold heifers back, so we know this supply crunch will last until at least 2026 before herds can get built up,” Copithorne says. “This is much different than in the 2014 to 2016 period when good weather and markets created a rapid herd rebuilding that materialized by 2016.” Similarly, the U.S. is also looking at a scenario that contrasts sharply from 2016’s. At that time, U.S. cattle for slaughter increased by 1.6 million head. Fast-forward to today and Copithorne says the U.S. is projected to lose roughly one million head a year until 2026, or roughly the equivalent of one billion pounds of beef production per year. BF Rebuilding beef cattle herds Doing something interesting on your farm? With crops, machinery or livestock? We want to know! Paul.Nolan@Farms.com TELL US WHAT YOU’RE UP TO
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