Blog Archive April 2016
Jeff I was looking through the scores of placings submitted on Livestockjudging.com the other day and noticed the the placings for most of the slaughter classes are abysmal relative to the placing classes.
Grading all steers 2.0/High Select would have done better than the average at TX FFA contest 4 of past 6 years.
In a bit of a panic that our slaughter grades are way off (we use the placings from the real contests for them) I looked at real world contests to see what is normal for slaughter classes.
The average score of the placing classes as well as female selection classes at the Texas state FFA judging contest is almost always right around 45 points.
Slaughter cattle grading?
The average score for the 6 classes since 2010 is 37.79. That’s not good.
You’d almost think that score is worse than kids would do by not even looking at the classes and guessing.
And you’d be right.
If a student had placed the slaughter cattle classes at the state FFA contest by just penciling in 2.0 and High Select for each animal over the past six years, they’d have averaged 39.33 points over that same time period, an improvement of 1.5 points.
| Year | All Contestant Average | 2.0/High Select Score |
| 2015 | 36.44 | 37 |
| 2014 | 40.57 | 42 |
| 2013 | 39.99 | 44 |
| 2012 | 37.34 | 37 |
| 2011 | 38.86 | 37 |
| 2010 | 33.52 | 39 |
Why 6 years? Mainly because that time time range where the 2.0/High Select thing would have worked.
If you go back to 2007 the default a kid should choose switches to 2.5/High Select because they’d have scored a 48 on slaughter if they did that for all of the placings. The contestants in the contest that year averaged just under 42 points.
To be clear, this isn’t a strategy to win the state contest this weekend. The kids that win and the teams that win all outperform the average by 5+ points for the slaughter classes. Of course they do, that’s why they win.
It’s just a proof of an old rule of thumb that ag teachers try to beat into the heads of the rest of the kids when they have to pull out the calculators to figure out how bad they did on that class of slaughter cattle.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $30,500 - Heifer sired by LT Rushmore 8060 Pld
- $28,000 - Heifer sired by Two Step 20Z
- $24,000 - Bull sired by Monopoly
- $18,500 - Bull sired by Monopoly
- $16,000 - Bull sired by Dakota Gold
- $16,000 - Bull sired by Hi Ho Silver
- $11,500 - Heifer sired by Supremacy
- $10,000 - Bull sired by Here I Am
- $9,500 - Heifer sired by Lutton Z305
- $9,500 - Heifer sired by Man Among Boys
Don’t know if the female is selling whole?
She’s not, trust me. I don’t care what sale it is; if she’s worth buying, she’s not selling without strings attached.
Have no fear, just hire a sale catalog interpreter, a job that has unfortunately become more and more necessary as the years go by.
Sale catalog interpreters read sale catalogs to figure out what exactly is selling in a particular lot. They are well trained in reading the fine print of sale catalogs to figure out what exactly is selling and translate it that into terms a mere mortal such as yourself can understand..
Is that flush done at the buyer’s expense or the seller’s?
Is there actually going to be a flush?
What the heck does “at the buyer’s convenience” REALLY mean anyway?
I get how it works for bulls but how the hell does ½ possession work for a female?
Is this lot only being sold with restrictions to make the female seem like she’s better?
Does 1/3 embryo interest actually mean something or are they just making sure they can benefit from you taking a chance on a female?
Sale catalog interpreters are capable of answer all of those questions. Well, most of them. Okay, some of them.
Sale catalog interpreters are skilled at sorting through bull **** to tell you what it actually is that you are bidding on.
…for small fee of just 1/3 possession and 1/7 embryo interest with the option to triple down and get 150% of the female plus 1/13 semen interest in her second born son while retaining all cloning rights.
Don't worry, that 1/13 semen interest never gets enforced anyway.
Tax day was Monday.
Did I tell you I got audited this year?
I tend to play it extremely conservatively on my taxes out of a relatively unfounded fear of doing something wrong. The IRS really isn’t that hard to work with on underpayment of taxes and it’s been my experience that they’ll agree to just about any reasonable payment schedule.
Regardless, my audit this year wasn’t an IRS audit; it was a Texas Workforce Commission audit.
The thing is, the only person I employ in the state of Texas is myself and I work from home. In an attempt to get ahead of what was going to be a larger than normal 2014 tax bill, I paid myself a bonus at the end of December that year. The bonus was setup so that virtually all of it went to my withholding. Surepayroll processed it oddly and it didn’t show up in my various federal tax returns, state withholding reports, and Quickbooks the same way.
Unfortunately, I also forgot I did it and during the Texas Workforce Commission audit, we spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out why there was a discrepancy. I got to my wit’s end on the situation and wanted to find out how much I could pay to just make the matter go away. Not a bribe, I just wanted to pay the maximum amount so I didn’t have to go through the process.
Me: “How much do I potentially owe in unemployment insurance?”Her: “Well, let me see, your UI tax rate is 0.8% but that’s capped at your first $9,000 in income for the year”Me: “Okay, well, we have determined that I made in excess of $9,000 a year, that’s pretty clear from my records. Was there a problem with that tax?”Her: “Oh, no, you paid that as scheduled.”Me: “Okay, what else is there that I might owe in relation to this audit?”Her: “Well, it’s just the unemployment insurance that we’re concerned with.”Me: “Didn’t I pay the maximum I could have to pay in a year?”Her: “Well, for you it is capped at 0.8% of $9000.”Me: “Right, and evidently I paid that $72”Her: “Yes, it appears so.”Me: “So I don’t owe any unemployment tax on the remaining income for the year?”Her: “Your rate is 0.8% and it’s only on the first $9,000 in income for the years.”Me: “Well why are we trying to figure out the difference in income for a paycheck that was way, way past that $9,000 income?”Her: “We have to make sure the numbers matchup with what we have on file.”Me: “But didn’t I pay the entire amount I could possibly owe for the year?”Her: “Well, again, your rate is 0.8% and that’s on the first $9,000 in income.”Me: “We’ve been trying to figure out a discrepancy for the past hour on income that your department doesn’t tax?”Her: “We just have to make sure the numbers match.”Me: “I’ll be in my office. Feel free to use whatever you want here in the kitchen.”
Yep, a government employee drove to my house for a two-hour audit by a commission that has already taxed me the maximum amount of money they could legally tax me for the year, $72.
$72.
I guarandamntee that lady made more auditing me than I actually pay the Texas Workforce Commission in unemployment insurance.
A young man passed away in South Texas last Friday.
By all accounts, he was a great kid. I know he was consistently upbeat when I saw him around the barns, he was well respected by his peers, and deeply loved by his family.
I only met him directly one time and it was nothing more than that way you meet so many different people at stock shows. It was a conversation amongst several people that he was a part of where at some point everyone goes around the circle and introduced themselves to the people they don’t know.
I say that because I don’t want to sound like I’m in any sort of position to eulogize the young man in any credible way.
No, this post is about just one extremely small aspect of his life, one of his last Facebook posts.
When I heard that he had died in a car accident, I was fearful but not 100% sure that the news was about the young man I thought it was. In fact, I had to go to Facebook to double check and see.
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I shed a small tear when I pulled his Facebook page up.
His Facebook page, at least the publicly available version of it, wasn’t the page of a young man doing teenage boy things. It wasn’t a bunch of snarky and sarcastic memes. It wasn’t anything the slightest bit inappropriate.
It was an extremely touching photo of him hugging his sister after he won his county show earlier this year.
I can only imagine what my Facebook page would look like if I were to unexpectedly pass away. There was a time when it would have almost certainly been a picture of a steer’s butt or some sort of stock show humblebrag. Nowadays, it would likely be a picture of my kids doing something at a tournament or playing whatever sport is currently in season.
As trivial as we can pretend Facebook and social media is, nowadays it matters. It’s the last way many people will connect with you if you are taken too soon. I don't think the young man could have picked a much better way to be remembered if he had tried.
When people go to Kollyn’s Facebook page now or years into the future, they’ll be reminded of a young man who loved show cattle and loved his sister.
What would they see on yours?
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $16,500 - Heifer sired by SHF Disco Thunder
- $16,500 - Heifer sired by Gup
- $16,500 - Semen sired by Dameron First Class
- $16,000 - Semen sired by Dameron First Class
- $12,500 - Heifer sired by Gambles Hot Rod
- $10,000 - Heifer sired by Delhawk Kahuna 1009 ET
- $8,250 - Bred Cow sired by KAP Mt Rocky
- $8,250 - Steer sired by Starburst
- $8,000 - Pair sired by JW Ariat
- $8,000 - Heifer sired by Turton
The first time your bull jumps into your neighbor's place, it's because he's a bull.
The second time your bull jumps into your neighbor's place, it's because you've got a problem.
The third time your bull jumps into your neighbor's place, it's because you're an a-hole.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $27,500 - Bull sired by BK Xikes X59
- $20,750 - Bull sired by +Mr. V8 901/4
- $17,500 - Heifer sired by WK Smooth
- $17,000 - Semen sired by Dameron First Class
- $16,500 - Heifer sired by CFCC Black Jack 001
- $16,500 - Semen sired by Dameron First Class
- $16,250 - Bull sired by Mr. V8 675/6
- $16,000 - Bull sired by +JDH Mr Elmo Manso
- $15,500 - Flush sired by Champion Hill Edition 2029
- $15,500 - Steer sired by Heat Wave
A chart of the 20th percentile of prices for steers sold online in the first quarter of the year divided by the value of a 500-lb large #1 feeder steer.
For example...
In 2016 the 20th percentile of steers sold online was $2,000. The value of a 500-lb steer at $1.58lb (OUCH) is $790. The ratio would be 2.53 or 253%.
Those of you who remember the old days back when cattle used to be sold in live auctions with actual auctioneers remember them. They were the guys that tried to bid $3,050 when the auction had been going in $250 increments all day long.
Most auctioneers would just ignore the bid but some would make a lesson out of him by slowing everything down to a crawl and proceeding the call the bids on that animal in $50 all the while mocking the guy who started the foolishness.
Then came online sales where you could bid do a $3,001 proxy bid and nobody would bat an eye.
Well, maybe the guy who bid $3,000 would while he’s looking at his computer screen….but it doesn’t matter because you’ll never meet that guy.
How frequently does that work in online steer sales?
The following chart is the percentage of steers sold online that year that sold for a final bid amount that was not divisible by $10 or $25. For example, a calf that sells for $30,003.
There are 23,289 individual sale lots over the course of seven years in this data…
If there were questions about whether or not the oil bust would play a role in a drop in steer prices, I think the numbers below answer that in the affirmative.
This is basically a “same store sales” type of comparison between the first quarter of 2015 and 2016 online steer sale seasons.
The only steers that are included in these numbers are steers that sold in online sales between January and March from operations that sold cattle in online sales in both 2015 and 2016.
There were 571 steers that sold in 49 sales by those 36 operations in 2015.
There were 593 steers that sold in 47 sales by those 36 operations in 2016.
I did that instead of the entire data set in order to do a more apples to apples comparison. The numbers aren't down quite as much when you include the rest of the steers that have sold online, but they were still down.
| Percentile | 2015 | 2016 |
| 95th | 11,000 | 10,000 |
| 90th | 9,250 | 7,250 |
| 80th | 6,000 | 5,310 |
| 70th | 4,750 | 4,304 |
| 60th | 3,990 | 3,500 |
| 50th | 3,500 | 3,001 |
| 40th | 3,000 | 2,750 |
| 30th | 2,600 | 2,400 |
| 20th | 2,251 | 2,000 |
| 10th | 2,000 | 1,800 |
| Aggregate | ||
| Count | 571 | 593 |
| Average | 4,669 | 4,173 |
The data set includes the $53,000 MAB sired roan steer that increases the 2016 average sale price by about $80.
Outside of that one calf, the prices for steers sold in those sales is down from top to bottom.
The overall average was down by 11.5%.
The net difference in gross sales for those 36 operations was $294,128, about $8,000 per operation/partnership.
There were 48 steers that sold for $10k or more in those sales in 2015 (8.4%) but only 30 in 2016 (5%).
I mean, we get it Mr. flat brimmed cap high school punk. We really do.
You’re different than the other kids in the barn. You’re not a clichéd hick.
You’re a white teenage boy who likes raps music and loves forcing other people to listen to it regardless of whether they want to or not. There’s nothing at all clichéd about that. YOU are unique.
You’re more fleek than anybody else in the barn and your standoffish too cool for school attitude makes that clear to everybody that walks by.
And you know what? I’m sure there’s some little girl in the barn who wasn’t raised right who will fall for that act.
I’m saying this for your own good, I promise.
Nobody can convince you just how annoying it is to listen to your music, not now. You're in teenage boy mode and neither rhyme nor reason has any hope of getting through to you.
But someday, many years from now, you’ll be driving along thinking back on your time showing steers and you’ll think back on that time you were blasting Meek Mill with a family one stall over who “just didn’t get it” because they’re hicks.
You’ll be alone but you’ll turn red in the cheeks.
You'll close your eyes and put your palm to your forehead and at that moment you’ll realize just how big an a-hole you were.
Past Posts
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