If you want to find out the true personality and what a person stands for then there are several instances that will let you know.
One test is often a divorce or settling an estate. Or basically anything to do with money and often money isn’t the main interest. It is often winning. It’s sometimes not needing the money or property but simply keeping the other person from getting it. The best thing to do is to take a step backward and try to look at it from the other person’s angle. That is often hard to do particularly when the devil is putting those evil thoughts in your head or often a spouse reminding you that you are getting cheated. And don’t get the story wrong as the devil and your spouse are not necessarily the same person.
This cattle business is the only business I have done. And I would like it even better if I felt like we individual cattlemen were getting a fair shake. The bulk of the long weaned feeder cattle are already sold and soon it will be mostly a big weaned calf. What I see this time of year is a feedlot wants those calves weaned 70 days to feel very comfortable that they won’t get sick. I know several ranchers do not understand them wanting that many days but they evidently have records to provide anything less can be a problem at least once in awhile. And if they are going to pay top price I don’t blame them.
If you are taking your cattle to a sale the first thing you need to look for is honesty and whether the representatives truly work for the seller. And make sure their auctioneers are the same. The next thing is you have got to have quite a few buyers there every week plus farmers and ranchers buying. If a sale has two or three buyers they are not going to bid against themselves.
We sold 72 steers Sept. 30 weighing 907 pounds and brought $158 per hundredweight and the last $5 per hundredweight was a quarter and a dime at a time making the seller lots of money.
I was talking to a retired veterinarian who said about 20 years ago a rancher asked him to come out to his place and pick out the best 2-year-old bull he had as he wanted to sell him in the special cow and bull auction at the sale the following week. So he went out there and the rancher had about 15 bulls to pick from. As he stirred them around he thought to himself there was not a good bull in there.
So he picked out what he thought was the best of what he had. After that sale was over and the bull had sold a lot cheaper than most of the other bulls the rancher walked by the veterinarian and said, “You couldn’t pick out a good bull if your life depended on it.” The veterinarian said, “Well, there wasn’t a good one to pick.”
The veterinarian said it made the rancher mad but it was the truth.
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the view of High Plains Journal. Jerry Nine, Woodward, Oklahoma, is a lifetime cattleman who grew up on his family’s ranch near Slapout, Oklahoma.
