Breaking Down the Numbers
The story behind $204.10.
Numbers are everywhere. They matter to a rancher, so they matter to the Certified Angus Beef® (CAB®) brand. A natural progression, CAB’s Black Ink team set out to uncover stories behind both common and irregular numbers that affect a cattleman’s future. From 120 million to -2.26, each one tells a story of how even the seemingly random and only slightly related are intertwined to impact profitability.
Every number has a story — take, for example, $204.10.
The number is $204.10, but it could have easily been 36.8% or $83.88 or 16.2%.
Those figures are all different ways to illustrate this truth: Cattle health is important — to your bottom line, to carcass quality, to consumer perception.
Yet in recent years, treatment rates in the feedyard have increased, almost doubling in some cases.
Of course, markets are always changing, but last year geneticist Holly Neibergs of Washington State University shared that the cost per animal treated for bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is $204.10. Somewhere around 16.2% of feedlot cattle suffer from BRD.
Rather than a magic vaccination formula alone to avoid illness, ranchers and cattle feeders alike say it’s teamwork that leads to improvement.
“You find the longer you’re in practice, the answers are very rarely in the bottle,” Ryan Loseke says. Alongside his wife, June, the Nebraska cattle feeder/veterinarian duo own Loseke Feedyard, just north of Columbus.
“It’s holistic and there are many factors that influence the end product,” Loseke says.
Most cattle are preconditioned for four to six weeks before they arrive at the feedyard, where they get a 24-hour rest period before processing.
“We’ve never really had a wreck, but we don’t buy high-risk cattle, either,” Loseke says.
Everybody wants to head off problems before they appear.
Purdue University veterinarian Mark Hilton says he has yet to meet a feeder who dreams of spending his days treating cattle.
“They hate having sick calves. They want to have healthy calves,” Hilton says, noting that’s his goal, too. “I’m a low-medicine veterinarian. I want to use management instead of medicine and money.”
So what of that 36.8% and $83.88?
According to data from the Tri-County Steer Carcass Futurity a few years ago, that’s the impact on cattle that needed two treatments compared to those never treated for sickness.
Those that had to be treated twice had 36.8% fewer achieving the premium Choice grade level (the marbling threshold for CAB), causing them to lose out on $83.88 in grid premiums.
Editor’s Note: Laura Conaway is a producer communications specialist for Certified Angus Beef LLC.