05/18/2025
We had right at 5020 head in the pens for the sale this week and after the take-homes we marketed 4998 Thursday! Record receipt for this company and the house was slam packed with people to see it. I counted 11 professional cow buyers for the morning sale plus producers in the seats buying! With almost 600 cows, we were thankful for each one.
We didn't get to take advantage of the Monday morning jump in the futures markets and by Thursday it was long forgotten with the red ink on the board. However, the kind of cattle and big run still allowed for grazing cattle and steers to be $3-8 higher this week! Heifers were about equally cheaper than the steers though as commodity cattle feeders set out to recover their risk. There is no fear among the feeder buyers, just had to re-sharpen their pencils after months of higher-higher-higher.
When a new season comes and the winds shift, many people who never saw it coming get caught trying to figure out how it happened. We set out to create what you see in Enid during this season over 10 years ago in a little barn in Caldwell, KS. We were built, not bought. When the opportunity came available to buy this facility, many different companies had the opportunity long before us to buy it and turned it down. I didn't deserve it and sure never had the money to even make it look feasible to acquire it but with some negotiation, lease to purchase agreements, and a lot of God's favor we bought it. You producers and buyers who choose to do business here, you all built it. My team and I simply run it like we'd hope someone would work for us if we weren't here.
Records are neat and the buzz about the biggest sale out of this barn is large. This is no corporate market, it's just us. There aren't multiple entities sorting your cattle, it's the same guys you see passed out in the chair at 5AM when then trucks come to load cattle. We were here Monday when they unloaded too. It's a big place and the numbers have certainly increased. If you can't figure out how it happened you just weren't watching how we sold 500 on the way to 5000!
Thanks to everyone who made this happen, encouraged us, came to watch, or sent a text to congratulate. Thanks to my crew who will be in recovery for a few more days. We'll be here to do it again next week.
-Dakota