For a smaller cattle producer looking to boost returns on calves, commingling may be the way to go.
“Any time that you are able to put truckloads of cattle together, you’ll increase the value of those calves fairly substantially because the buyers can easily put those truckloads together,” Gant Mourer, beef value enhancement specialist at Oklahoma State University, told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “There are some challenges but producers, with the cost of inputs, are still wanting to get the most value out of their calves as they can.”
Among those challenges is finding like-minded neighbors; commingling works best when cattle are preconditioned, and high prices for both inputs and cattle can make those steps uneconomical for some producers. But Mourer said they’ll be rewarded. “Even if you have five, six or seven head of your own cattle going through the auction ring, you can capture more premium and more value for your cattle, even up to $5-6/cwt if you’re able to put even small groups of cattle together,” he said.
When cattle from different herds have gone through value-added marketing programs like the one Mourer oversees, the Oklahoma Quality Beef Network, they’ve been managed uniformly and can be gathered in one location to be offered to a set of buyers. “If we get enough of those cattle, there are a lot of those buyers there and they bid against each other, therefore increasing the value of those calves,” he said. In addition, the Joplin Regional Stockyards conducts commingled sales. “They put these cattle together either through their program, our program or another program, and offer all these cattle up at once; sometimes, we’re able to get 3,000-5,000 head in one location,” Mourer said.
But not every market is set up to handle commingled lots, University of Missouri Extension southwest region livestock specialist Eldon Cole told OFN. That could lead to animal health problems if all of the commingled animals have not been through the same program. “There is that risk of one set of calves coming in that is naïve to a disease that another group might be harboring in their bodies,” he said. “This is the problem that we would run into at a lot of local auction barns if they try to commingle; they may not have a strict enough health protocol to guarantee that all of these cattle have had a similar round of shots at a similar time in the past.”
When cattle from different sources are combined and offered as a unit, they have to be of the same sex and of similar age, weight and breed composition. “You need to put them together and make them look like they’ve been together for a long time,” said Cole. “A lot of times you’ll get some rather poor cattle blended in with some really good ones, just because they might all be black or white or tan or red. Then, on down the road, those cattle will start looking less and less alike; their performance may be drastically different and when you hang them up on the rail, their difference may be as much as daylight and dark.”
The larger the load, the more the order buyer or feedlot operator likes it. “They don’t like to sit in the sale barn all day, waiting for one and two head here and one and two head there, and then try to put them together themselves,” Cole noted. “A lot of time can be wasted driving from one small sale to another to pick up a few head here, maybe a half a trailer load, and go to another one and pick up some there. There are economies that can be had from both the buyer’s and the seller’s standpoint.”
Ranchers can plan ahead together to facilitate commingling. In addition to similar health programs, they can maintain similar genetics. Said Cole, “If people have been using the same type of bulls – in the ideal situation, if the two or three herds that are going to be working together on this have cows that are similar, and they can get together and use the genetics from an artificial insemination program that is exactly the same on the sire side – then you’re talking business in getting some cattle together that really match up, and will make the next buyer happy.”
