A36-Lancaster Fanning, Saturday, August 5, 2000 Cattle Feeders Accept Challenge MICHELLE RANCK Farming Staff NEW HOLLAND (Lancaster Co.) If you can't judge a book by its cover, it seems you can’t always judge a steer by its c010r... or size, or conforma tion. After participating in the “Fantasy Beef Quality Chal lenge,” producers learned that cattle value is not a always a black-and-white issue. About 100 cattle feeders and industry representatives learned valuable lessons about visual ap praisal and its link to net return as they participated in the con Here is your chance to try out your visual ap praisal skills. After filling in the blanks with your es timation of how the cattle would perform, chose the top five animals and rank them, one being the best. The weight shown is the weight of the steer upon purchase. Steers numbered 2,4, and 5 were on pasture an additional 98 days before entering The feedlot. The dollar value is the initial feeder calf value and the final number is the number of days the steer was in the feedyard. The results may be surprising, as they were to many of the participants. A score card is included with the rest of the story. test during the Cattle Feeder’s Summer Workshop at Yoder’s Restaurant in New Holland. As part of an effort to educate and improve profitability in the cattle feeding industry, Penn State Cooperative Extension, the Pennsylvania Beef Council, and nine agribusiness companies sponsored the event. The contest, developed at Texas A&M University, is part of an industry-wide push to zero in on beef quality. One of the goals of the program include de termining participants’ ability to judge growth potential, carcass quality and profitability of feeder calves. The lesson, then, was to illustrate the difficulty of accu rately judging cattle visually. As in many real life situations, participants had only visual ap pearance and initial feeder calf weight and value to select the top steers. Participants warm up for the event by going through the Texas contest. After choosing five “winners” and five “losers” out of a field of 24 cattle, pro ducers were able to see how each steer performed. The next step, then, was to evaluate a field of seven random steers fed at Herr Angus in Not tingham and sold on grid pricing to Moyer Packing, where the cat tle were evaluated and slaugh tered. Intervet representative John McFadden advised paying care ful attention to frame size, thick ness of muscling, and body dition in predicting net return on the animals. “We’d like you to think about Quality and Yield grade, average daily gain, dressing percent, and ribeye area to determine profit that you would get from each steer,” explained Hughes. “What we’re going to ask you to do is predict net return, or what you think the cattle will make in re turn or loss.” Each steer was put up individ ually on the screen with the background information of the steer’s weight upon purchase, the price paid for the animal, and the number of days on feed. The cattle were photographed half way through the feeding pro gram. Net return was the dollar value of the steer minus the cost of finishing the steer. Final costs were estimated at $8 per head for pro cessing, $4O to $5O yardage costs, and 88 cents to $1.05 per head per day for feed costs. Each participant ranked what they believed to be the top five of the seven cattle. Only three participants picked the top steer as their number one rank. No one had an exact ranking, but John Bowman of B&R Cattle Company in Marietta had the first four ranked correctly. According to an article by Don Hale, Joe Paschal, and Rob Maddock, proj ect leaders from Texas A&M, the fantasy challenge il lustrates that both good and bad cattle come in many dif ferent packages, so the outside physical characteristics will not always accu rately predict the bottom line: net re turn. Preconceived ideas about cattle types may prove to be a hindrance to picking an animal for performance, according to the au thors. Also Quality grade, while an im portant component of the animal’s end value, may not completely reflect the bottom-line dol lar value. In truth, value is a result of variables which include health, average daily gain, feed effi ciency, initial feeder calf price, Quality and Yield Grades, and dressing per centages. The authors hoped to show through the contest the difficulty of pre dicting value by vis ual estimation. Al though this is an important key of cattle selection, cat tle with known background and health history would improve feedlot profits. The only way to get this background and history, how ever, is by individu al animal identifica t i o n . This management tool may prove to be key in the future of (Turn to Pago A 37)
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