CATTLEMEN'S APPROACH TO PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY CHANGING

            There's a change in thinking taking hold in cattle country, says Dr. Ted McCollum, and the more coordinated approach to producing cattle that is resulting will benefit every sector of the beef marketing chain. 

            One sector where that coordinated approach will be seen more and more is in stocker production, he told cattle feeders attending the Texas Cattle Feeders Association Annual Convention this weekend in Dallas .  The specifications on cattle are changing as we move into a new and different marketing era, he said, and that will change, in some fairly fundamental ways, how cattlemen look at production efficiency. 

            "We now have to not only worry about production efficiency from a cost standpoint, but we have to enhance the value of those animals at harvest."  And optimizing cost of production while optimizing value isn't always an easy goal. 

            For example, he said two independent data sets show that it takes about 100 days to increase marbling one degree.  "That means anything we do on pasture that increases or decreases pasture performance may affect how that animal grades." 

In the old days, that didn't matter much, because how the animal performed in the packing plant was of little concern to the stocker operator.  With more coordinated production and marketing systems becoming the norm, the stocker operator will have a greater opportunity to participate in the value (or lack thereof) of those animals. 

Take, for instance, the time-honored practice of finding big, rangy, thin, under-managed cattle and profiting from the compensatory gain of those animals.  "They probably had relatively little marbling when they entered the feedyard.  Those animals may have less carcass value because they won't marble as well or their carcass weights may be less desirable than animals from a stocker program with a higher plane of nutrition," McCollum said.  With grid marketing becoming more commonplace, and with the need for feeders to know some history of the cattle and have some source verification in order to use grids to their full advantage, stocker operators will have increasing incentive to take a hard look at their management practices, McCollum predicted. 

            Another area where a change in thinking is taking place is in the frame of reference that cattle feeders historically have used.  That frame of reference is shifting away from live cattle and toward the carcass.  In the past, the benchmark for feed efficiency was live weight gain but will shift to carcass weight gain.  "Our frame of reference for determining cost of gain and feed efficiency is different for those two," he says.  And once cattle feeders shift to benchmarking from carcass weight gain, how they look at various feedyard management practices, like days on feed, will change as well. 

The changes in cattle marketing, with more emphasis on alliances and coordination and more information flowing down the production system from grid marketing, will only benefit those cattlemen willing to change their thinking and adjust their frame of references, McCollum believes.  And in the end, the real beneficiary will be the consumer-and the cattleman willing to be part of a system that provides the consumer with exactly what he or she wants.

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