The Cowboy Church is a weekly gathering of cowboys and cowgirls who come together to sing, pray, and shoot the breeze. They meet at a local bar in Fort Worth, Texas on Sundays from 2pm-5pm.
The bible based church near me is a new church that is based on the bible and is designed for people who live in the country.
Lee Pitts is a columnist for The and Paso Robles Press who can be reached at [email protected].
Our county’s final auction market closed a few years ago, and it seemed like our collective heart had been torn out. This year, the auction market in California that had handled the most cattle of any sale barn for decades also shuttered its doors. There were about 1,500 auction markets in America when we purchased a cattle newspaper that serviced the livestock auction business 35 years ago. It’s now half that.
In my region, the cattle auction market was the lifeblood of the industry. When I say it was like a church, I hope I’m not being sacrilegious. Once a week, we’d get together to visit our pals, who always sat in the same seats. We’d all wonder whether Jim was alright if one of those chairs was empty. Is Dick ill, or where has G.B. gone? I’ve been in certain auction barns where the buyer’s name is painted on the back of the seat, and no one else has ever had the courage to sit there.
We now have no place to visit, get up on the gossip, or see for ourselves how much our cattle are worth and why some are worth more than others without an auction barn. We’d dine at the coffee shop and figure out how to fix the world’s problems. Once a month, our county cattlemen’s organization met there, and many of us went to instructional lectures there before a sale to learn how, where, and with what to properly vaccinate our animals. There was an annual bull auction where you could enhance your herd by purchasing better bulls, as well as a replacement female sale with a good reputation for selling excellent females. We knew we could always sell an old cow or two, and if we had any spare grass, we could purchase a few stockers. We might even be paid the same day we sold them!
Many livestock publications rely on advertisements from auction barns to stay alive, and the money that ranchers spend in town one day a week helps barber shops, feed mills, local farm supply stores, western wear shops, and, if the check for the animals you sold was large, expensive restaurants.
We’re going to get through this together, Atascadero
If the sale barn were a church, price discovery would be its religion. The main issue in the cattle industry right now is how to get the packer to compete for our fat animals, since the vast majority of fat cattle are sold in secret marketing agreements with captive feedlots, and we never know the price. It’s no surprise that the packers are earning thousands of dollars per head for owning a beast for a week. The only reason the beef business hasn’t followed in the footsteps of the pig and poultry industries is because auction markets and its offshoots, video livestock auctions, still feature competitive bidding. The chicken pluckers never had auctions, and when the pork producers lost theirs, 90 percent of their workers went with them.
My closest buddy, who ran a fantastic auction market, and I used to go to purebred auctions together. One of the worst professions in the world has to be owning one. It’s like sleepwalking into a propeller once a week. It’s the auction barns, not the ranchers, that bear the brunt of the danger of a bad check, a broke small packer, or a broke large order buyer. My buddy was always on the phone, either attempting to find new customers or informing the ones he already had about what he had coming up that week. I recall a phone call from a rancher who was unhappy with the way his two head consignment, a Holstein calf and an elderly cow, had been sorted. Every time the old grump consigned, he phoned later to grumble about the commission, the checkoff money, or the brand inspection. “You know, you aren’t the only auction market in the world,” he once informed a buddy. I’m considering selling my livestock to one of your competitors.”
“I simply happen to have his phone number,” my buddy immediately responded. Allow me to go fetch it for you.”
It’s true what they say: you don’t understand how valuable something is until you lose it. If your county is fortunate enough to have a cattle auction, I hope you take use of it.
As an example:
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