Montana Cattle Rancher Breaks Down the Real Economics: $100-200 Profit Per Calf

Gina Snyder [00:00:00] So that cow with her small calf is one a UM, and you pay for that pasture. You pay $25 for her to graze for one month, and there's a, there's a forage equivalent to that too. So you kind of figure that she's gonna eat like 30 pounds of forage a day. So it's a, it's a real loose term to be able to equate that, those, those 20 acres or a hundred acres down to the forage value of that. I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:41] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Well, we are in an ag special. I was sitting around with my executive producer, Ben Anderson, and we were talking about all the issues going on in agriculture, and it very quickly became apparent to me that you really have to dig in and understand what is going on in farming to understand just how complicated some of the problems are that are going on right now are. So we have scoured the world. We've used Twitter, we've contacted people, I've met throughout all of my travels while speaking to farm bureaus and farm organizations around the world. And we have found some amazing guests to outline how does our food system work, and where are there problems that are breaking things down? So you can expect that we'll be talking about the massive drought that's going on out west. We'll talk about things like avian flu and African swine fever, and we're probably, if we can, gonna get an expert on the wild mice epidemic that's going on in Australia. This is a little bit of a departure from the Ordinary podcast. Oftentimes during the regular podcast, I ask people about their inner voices and where are things taking them and their aspirations. And sometimes we talk about current events. These episodes are gonna be really focused on agriculture and what's going on with them. So this'll be a little bit different, but we're excited to bring you this agriculture series. Thank you so much for coming by. And if you're interested in supporting the work that I'm doing, you can always go to vance crow.com.

Vance Crowe [00:02:13] There you will find my speaking page. And now that Coronavirus is over, you can see that my schedule is filling up, going to talk to groups all over the country, really all over the world, and talking about how can you have better conversations with people that you disagree with? How can your organization respond to the problem of succession planning where we have these storied institutions, and yet there's nobody around to pass them on to. These are the types of things that you can find out more about on my speaking page, and you can do that at Vance Crowe dot com. Now on the interview with our very first agricultural guest, Gina Snyder from Last Chance Ranch. Gina Snyder, welcome to the podcast.

Gina Snyder [00:02:57] Thanks for having me dance.

Vance Crowe [00:03:00] So this is a different sort of podcast. We are focusing on doing ag issues. I have come to the conclusion that many of my friends living in the city have no concept that there is a massive drought going on out west. The, when they hear about the mice running wild in Australia, this is a shocking thing to them. And African Swine Fever is one of those things that maybe they've heard once or twice, but have no idea how it works. And so I got together with my executive producer and said, why don't we have a series, I don't know how many we'll do until we kind of cover some, some issues on what's going on in ag. And I put this out in Twitter and you raised your hand as like, Hey, I think people don't understand about how cattle are raised, particularly out west and what the CRP programs are. So you are the very first person to put their hand up. And so you're the very first interview. So welcome to this ag series. To begin, Gina, tell me a little bit about Last Chance Ranch.

Gina Snyder [00:03:57] Oh, well, last Chance Ranch is just kind of my Twitter name I guess. We went to a few classes, I guess it was a Ranching for Profit class and kind of changed our operation around. And I always kind of thought in the back of my head that Last Chance Ranch would be a a, a good description of, of where we were at because we were, we needed to turn our business around. And we kind of put a timeline on that of this is, this is our last chance to ranch and if we can't figure it out, we need to stop pretending to be ranchers and do something else. And also, the other last chance part of it is what we changed is we're buying, we're buying cows that, that maybe are the bottom end of somebody else's operation. They're not the prettiest, they're not the most uniform, but they worked well in our operation because they were maybe a later calving date, and we were looking for that. So we bought some cows that were, that didn't breed up in that traditional March and April time period, and were like more of a May or June calving cow. And so I guess in a way it was kind of their last chance to ranch. So what

Vance Crowe [00:05:20] A great description. You know, as you started that, you said, Hey, we went to this class, farming for Profit. I think most people's conception is ranchers already know what they're doing. They're making money out there. I don't even know that people really associate it with it being a business. Tell me a little bit about what made you decide to go to a class and what do you learn at a class? Farming, you know, ranching for Profit,

Gina Snyder [00:05:40] Ranching for Profit, we really learned the, the business end of it. You know, we're, we're a lot of, we have a lot of tradition of how to run a ranch out here, and sometimes we get caught up in that tradition and we get a tunnel vision on, you know, the nicest looking cow or I don't know, some different things that we think we should be doing. And if you take, if you step back and look at that big picture view, and it's, and it's nothing unique to farming or ranching, I think anybody who has been an entrepreneur has seen a business or tried to start their own business, sometimes they get off on a rocky start. And, and this was just a let's step back and look at this, look at the economics of it and make sure that each little part of our business is holding its own and, and propping us up instead of the other way around. At the time, we were working two jobs in town, which is typical of farming families. I was actually the ag extension agent for about 10 years in our county. So I was doing that and my husband was working for the highway department, and so he was, he was gone most of the day. I was gone most of the day. We'd come home and we'd try to work on our ranch, and it's small compared to a lot of ranches. We're not, we're not a huge ranch. We were trying to make that work. And then we also have some rental properties too that we were trying to start that business at the same time and our rental properties were taking off and our cows were not.

Gina Snyder [00:07:20] And we really needed to look at that business and go, what are we doing in this side that's working that we can make work in our ranch? And it was really looking at it as a business instead of a tradition or a culture or a, a lifestyle. A lot of times that's used as well. It's the lifestyle. Well, you can't support that lifestyle if it's not, if you're not making a profit.

Vance Crowe [00:07:45] It seems to me like if, if from an outsider looking at ranching, it looks like, okay, in order to ranch, you're gonna need to get some cows together. You probably have to get some fence and you need some water and some hay. And then as long as you feed them that the hay when when they're not out on pasture, you know, now they've got plenty to eat and then you sell 'em. And as long as you sell them for more than you bought them for or the more that you put in, then you're making money. Right.

Gina Snyder [00:08:11] What

Vance Crowe [00:08:11] About that is, is because I'm sure that's too small to, to like, it's, it's more complicated.

Gina Snyder [00:08:17] It is. Whoops, I'm losing my pages here in my notes. You know, if you really break it down into the business, you know, you've got a a cow, you have to start out with your cow, like you said, and that cow might be a thousand to $2,000 for one cow. You need some acres to put it on depending on what part of the country you're in. Say if you're in New Mexico, you might need a hundred acres to run that one cow. If you're in northeastern Montana, we're looking at maybe 20 acres per cow. If you're in say, Kentucky or you know, somewhere maybe where you're at or you know, Missouri, some higher rainfall, you are looking at maybe two acres per cow. So you have to match that with how much grass production your rainfall will allow and your soils and, and, and that sort of thing. So I guess you start out with your cow, you have to figure out how many you can have your acres of grass and how much will support that. We're in the northern plains, so we have winter, so we have to figure out our hay, but hay can be, you know, $80 a ton or a hundred dollars a ton, and she's gonna go through a couple tons of that a winter, one or two depending on the winter. So you look at, so you have this cow that's you bought, let's say we bought it for a thousand dollars just for easy math, which if you wanted, I mean we, we try to keep it around there, but there's a lot of people that buy more expensive for their own reasons that cow's only gonna last say five years on average in the herd.

Gina Snyder [00:10:02] I mean, she can live for a long time, but there's gonna be, she's gonna come up open or you know, something's gonna happen. And the average cow herd or average cow will probably last around in five years in the herd. So it's not, you don't just get one and she lasts forever and give you this cow or this calf forever.

Vance Crowe [00:10:23] And to clarify, when you say you're raising cows that's specifically you have moms that you're then breeding to then raise other to, to have calves that then you can sell,

Gina Snyder [00:10:33] Right? Right. We are purely a commercial cow calf operation. So we, we actually buy through the sales ring. There's a lot of ranches that raise their own replacement heifers, which I guess some people don't understand the difference between a heifer and a steer and a, you know, bull calf or whatever. But a lot of them raise their own heifers. We, we choose not to do that for our own economic reasons, I guess. So yeah, so the,

Vance Crowe [00:11:04] So you've got the cow, you've had it for five years, you've gotta feed it at least two tons or one to two tons of hay if you make it through the winter.

Gina Snyder [00:11:12] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:11:12] How about, and, and like, you've gotta move it all the time. If you're talking about, you know, a hundred acres per cow or 20 acres

Gina Snyder [00:11:19] Per

Vance Crowe [00:11:19] Cow, that means they've gotta be moving then do they move on their own or do you direct them where to go?

Gina Snyder [00:11:25] We direct them where to go. We, and that goes a lot into the, the range management that, that we do the grassland management, we cut those pastures down into smaller areas. You gotta make sure there's water for them also. That's a, that's a huge thing in our area. Water is our, is a short supply, you know, we have a lot of stock dams this year. Stock dams are dry. So because we don't have the rainfall this year,

Vance Crowe [00:11:53] What is a stock dam? I don't know what that is.

Gina Snyder [00:11:55] Okay, so a stock dam is maybe in like a, we, we call 'em Cooley here, but, or a draw or a, you know, a, a valley, I guess a small valley. They were dug out. So it's just a dam. It's just, they're just a small dam that has, you know, and most of 'em have been in for years and years. There's not very many new stock dams now, but, so the stock dams usually catch snowfall or the runoff from, from melting snow is where that water source is. So this past winter we and a lot of other areas in the west have not had a lot of snowfall so that there's, there's not any runoff into those dams. So if you're, say you have a thousand acres and you have one stock dam and that's your only water source, you're gonna end up with a lot of overgrazing around that stock dam. So water development is a huge, a huge part of what we have done. And a lot of the government programs that, you know, that assist farmers and ranchers have actually helped with a lot of water distribution. So there isn't that concentration of livestock around those, those dams or those only those small water sources. So that was kind of a, a tangent I guess there, but the water water's a huge, huge deal. And I know you've talked a little bit about, you know, just on the farming side and in California and stuff right now that, you know, we have a water shortage and that, that impacts agriculture so much.

Gina Snyder [00:13:29] So,

Vance Crowe [00:13:30] So you have a water shortage right now in northeast Montana

Gina Snyder [00:13:34] Rainfall? Yeah, we're, we're in a drought. We did not have the, the snow runoff, the melting for the stock dams. But we have put in a pipeline, oh, it's been 20 years now or more. We have a lot of pipeline water through, so they can be either off of wells or we actually have it through our rural water system. We have, we have been watering some livestock, so that has helped immensely. That evens out the distribution helps in the range management grows more grass pulls in, more carbon. That's kind of, you know, ranching is really a, a carbon friendly thing, I guess.

Vance Crowe [00:14:17] What do you mean by that? To, to, to somebody that to totally doesn't understand because most of the time they're told that cows are bad, bad, bad for the environment. So if you say they're carbon friendly, what does that mean?

Gina Snyder [00:14:30] Right. Well, think about, I mean, if you put a cow out there, she's, she's not using any fossil fuels. She's not using, she's just out there being, you know, the closest thing to a buffalo that we have. And these rangelands were developed or, you know, they, they were evolved with large ruminant animals, the buffalo going through here. So we're really missing, missing that part of the equation. We just, we keep hearing this or people in the city or consumers or the general public are hearing this eat less red meat, you know, that meatless Mondays and, and I I think we're, we're not looking at this big picture of how these grasslands are functioning and how they are sequestering carbon. I mean, carbon sequestration is this huge buzzword right now that grasslands have been doing naturally forever. So you have this

Vance Crowe [00:15:37] Yeah, I think there's an impression that people have about cows that, or you know, cattle in general that, that the general public doesn't distinguish between cows and cattle or Right. But what they say is like, oh, I have seen feedlots and I imagine that the cow is born on a feedlot. They live on a feedlot and then they, you know, get, get put picked up and taken to the butcher and they have no concept of Right. Most of the cattle that ever make it to a feedlot are raised on pastures and then just at the very end are taken to a feedlot. This is like really very surprising to people living in the city.

Gina Snyder [00:16:10] Right, right. You know, when a year ago when coronavirus hit and everything, we had this, this meme was floating around on Facebook or whatever, and I had a, a cousin of mine, she sent it to me and, and the deal was there's not a meat shortage, it's just a big meat processing. Plants are closed and here's what you do. You team up with your friends and you go find a farmer and buy a steer and you process it. And I said, that's a great idea. I would love to be able to do that, but I don't have a fat steer out in my pasture just waiting for you to walk by and, and you know, buy it. And we cut it up and we put it in your freezer. It's such a long process to get there. And like you said, we're, we are on the very beginning of it, the cow calf part. I mean, we have the mother cows out there that, that they have this calf and by the time that it's actually ready to be put in a freezer that's 18 months to sometimes 30 months before that calf is ready to be in your freezer. So there is a misconception of, of how that whole, how that, how long that process takes. And for the first nine months that calf is out in the pasture and they are grazing and you know, like your, like your lawn, once it grazes, you know, once you mow it, then it grows again.

Gina Snyder [00:17:43] And that's the beginning of that idea of that carbon sequestration idea that that cows are doing. Because the more, the more we graze those lands, the more grass it grows, the more carbonate sequesters, it's like tree growth or you know, trees get, trees get all the credit for all the carbon sequestering and our grasslands are, are doing a lot of it. And we really need to look at that, that part of the equation more.

Vance Crowe [00:18:13] Yeah, it's, it's a funny thing to think about, like cows going out and eating grass, which has taken all of the minerals and nitrogen out of the air and oxygen and, and made it into a plant. And then the, the cow is able to eat that, break it down, take all of the energy, the a TP out of it. And actually because they're ruminants, they do really successful. It's not like a horse that like most of what comes out of a horse is undigested because they don't have this multi chambered stomach. And so when you're talking about ruminant animal that like by the time it's moved through the, is it three chambers in a cow or is it two,

Gina Snyder [00:18:45] Four?

Vance Crowe [00:18:46] There's

Gina Snyder [00:18:46] Four. Don't ask me to name all of them, but,

Vance Crowe [00:18:49] Well, I'm glad I didn't know. Okay, so there's four

Gina Snyder [00:18:51] Chambers, it's four,

Vance Crowe [00:18:52] And by the time it jumps all four chambers, it is stripped out as much energy as, as is left there. And then what's left over are all of the minerals and the carbon, as you were saying in their D that now can get redistributed in their insects, come in right.

Gina Snyder [00:19:08] Eat

Vance Crowe [00:19:08] It and birds can take it. And it's a part of a cycle that when you're teaching kids about cows, people just don't, don't get this part of it. They, they think that that that the cows are, are in a factory floor and that this manure is all waste and they don't understand that it's a part of the cycle.

Gina Snyder [00:19:25] Right, right. And yeah, that whole animal is part of that cycle. And you know, there's a real, the trend has been going on for quite a while. I don't know if you've listened to any of Alan Savory's Ted Talks. I would really encourage anybody who is not understanding this carbon cycling and the importance of ruminant animals on rangelands to really look up a savory's stuff. And that would be an excellent guest. He's very, very good at explaining that and how the whole system fits together and how when we're grazing those grasslands we're stomping in seeds, we're, we're automatically fertilizing it. I mean it's a, it's self fertilizing. It's, and the more you concentrate these animals, the more we get that hoof action and take the, the dead dry matter that's above ground and put it back into the ground along with, you know, the, the manure and everything that's processed too. And you know, it's, it's kind of nature's nature's combine. It's nature's fertilizer watering system. You know, it's taken the water from this pond and she goes and pees over in the other part of the pasture too. You know, you could see that

Vance Crowe [00:20:44] That never dawned on me that it would be moving moisture around as well. It's moving

Gina Snyder [00:20:49] Moisture, it's moving nutrients. Yeah. Just, just creating more, more, I'm losing the words for it, but, you know, creating more water holding capacity throughout the pasture and, you know, clean water is something that we don't give our rangelands enough, enough credit for either. You know, that whole filtering system of, of healthy soils and healthy grasslands. It's good for the water, it's good for the air, it's good for so many things. And we visited a little bit about CRP earlier and you know, you can say, well,

Vance Crowe [00:21:27] So what is CRP? So for people that have no, no concept of this, what is it?

Gina Snyder [00:21:31] Okay, so the conservation reserve program is what what it is and it's, it's something that started, the federal government started in the eighties to take land, crop land out of production. And there was a wildlife aspect that was kind of ga you know, part of it that we're gonna, you know, put these acres aside for wildlife. And there were some other, I think, kind of political reasons that a lot of that happened and market reasons and stuff that you're gonna have to find somebody that's a better expert than me on that.

Vance Crowe [00:22:04] Well, you could make a good, you could make a good case if you drive through Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. Like it was just corn, corn, corn, soy, so soy, right. It was just on and on and on. So, and

Gina Snyder [00:22:13] Up here it was wheat, wheat, wheat.

Vance Crowe [00:22:15] Oh, okay, okay. I didn't even realize it. So then, so then you have the government come in and say, well actually what we wanna do is bring down the amount of supply because if we overproduce grain, we can drop the price down. Yeah.

Gina Snyder [00:22:27] So if,

Vance Crowe [00:22:28] If we can get farmers, we can pay them to take land out of rotation of crops and just have it, let it grow wild. Maybe have it be grasses, maybe like little trees growing for, I think it's eight, is it eight years? Something like that.

Gina Snyder [00:22:41] It's 10 years and 10 years. And we don't have, I mean we can't really grow a lot of trees up here. We have some shelter belts, but this is not tree growing country. And also part of that was, it was highly erodible lands that, so, and in this I I definitely do agree with, there are a lot of past or a lot of fields up here that should have never been farmed. And I don't blame them for farming them. I mean, we've learned so much about farming in the last 50, 80, a hundred years. Some of these were broke out in the thirties, twenties, or thirties or whatever. And it was not land that should have been farmed because it was highly erodible by wind, by there was just not the top soil there to, to keep that ground cover, to keep it, to keep it there. So CRP was introduced and the beginning of the CRPP program was, we're not gonna graze it, we're not gonna use it. It's, you don't even, I remember when the program started, our, one of our neighbors growing up, he put his land into CRP and we were told, you know, don't even ride your horse out there. He could get in so much trouble because you're not supposed to touch that ground. It's supposed to be just this natural, you know, wildlife area. And we've seen the attitude of that change a lot. Livestock grazing is, I think we're down to, we can either hay or graze every other year.

Gina Snyder [00:24:14] And it depends on the particulars of that field and the program that it went into. But, and

Vance Crowe [00:24:20] That's because they came to the conclusion, Hey, hey, wait a second, by not grazing these, we're, we're creating fire hazards. We're creating

Gina Snyder [00:24:27] Weeded

Vance Crowe [00:24:28] Banks that, and

Gina Snyder [00:24:29] Not only that, the plant, I mean, you think of you like your lawn, it's this green growth every year. These plants are, they're choking themselves out in, they're dying in the middle. So we end up with bare ground. And if you look at, if you take a, a pasture or a a a, yeah, a pasture that's next to a CRP field and it, it maybe is being, or it was taken out of CRP, so it's not in that program anymore and we're grazing it, you will see the, the plants are closer together. There's less bare ground, they're more vigorous plants where they've been grazed. And you can go into those CRP that have not, that maybe they've been hayed. So the, the forage has been taken off and not incorporated back into the soil by the hoof action of that cow. You'll see this bare ground in these CRP fields that are not there in the pastures just because of the, of the use and that nutrient and carbon cycling that's been happening and, and creating a a, you know, the water holding capacity is better in those lands too because of the Yeah, just the, I'm losing my words for it. I can't, I should have wrote it down so I could come up with that word. But, you know, the, the water holding capacity is there in, in these utilized land instead of the stuff that's just been left stagnant and choking itself out.

Vance Crowe [00:25:57] So let's go back to, you have this cow calf operation, you have these cows, you keep them for five years, they have calves. Are you immediately, as soon as that calf drops on the ground, are they picked up and, and take and sold or how does this work? Oh, how long do you keep 'em for? How does, how do explain that to me.

Gina Snyder [00:26:15] We keep, I mean they're, we just, we just actually moved them to another pasture yesterday or Yeah, yesterday we, we branded and we moved them to another pasture. They're, they're, you know, a month old. Some of 'em, they stay with the calf or with a cow. We go until February most of the time and then wean them and then we call the truck and they pick 'em up and they take 'em, 'em to the sales ring. They are then sold to somebody else that holds 'em until, and they're sold at about 500 pounds the finishing weight by the time they're ready.

Vance Crowe [00:26:56] How big is a 500 pound cow? Like if, or a 500 pound calf could you get on its back? Would it be able to hold you up if you, if you got on it?

Gina Snyder [00:27:05] Yeah, I, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:27:07] I just don't have a concept for it. Right. If you tell me it weighs 500 pounds, there's no the, the size, you know, is it a past

Gina Snyder [00:27:13] Your waist? Yeah, I, I bet that would be kind of hard to, I I am not sure how I can even, I guess we're gonna have to have some videos or something. I'll have to show you what a 500 pound calf is. But yeah, so then after the sales ring it, it's picked up by somebody else that either grazes it maybe on some, some fields in Kansas or somewhere. They, they put more pounds on the calf typically, and then, then it's sold into the, the feedlot, you know, after that. But the, it's only for the last couple hundred pounds that they're in the feedlot typically. And we're also seeing more of a trend for seeing those calves carried out all the way to that 2-year-old or that 18 to 30 month old age on grass, which is, you know, if you have problems with feedlots, which I don't, there's definitely a place for them, but there's, there's other routes for, for having your red meat too, is it doesn't have to go through a feedlot. You can have this grass fed beef also, which is actually what I prefer because that's what I'm used to. But you know, we usually have a couple steers or that we throw out with the cows and they just live out their life until we take 'em to the local packing plant or the local butcher

Vance Crowe [00:28:35] Here. So let's talk about that. So if you have a steer that is just raised on grass, it is going to get fatted or like to the level where you could slaughter it and it would have enough like meat on it to be able to, to really harvest it. How much longer does it take if you're raising them on grass then if you tried to put 'em in the feedlot?

Gina Snyder [00:28:55] Probably a year longer. I mean

Vance Crowe [00:28:56] Wow. A year longer. Yeah,

Gina Snyder [00:28:58] It does take longer. Yep. And it's a lot of preference too. You know, we've, the beef that we eat has been fed corn and has, it's a, it changes the flavor of the meat and we push that calf to gain faster. And that's something that the egg industry has gotten really good at, is being very efficient at producing, producing beef. But yeah, there is a place for that grass fed animal too, but it takes longer. So, you know, if, if we were to change to a system like that and carry over our yearlings, I mean by the time they're a year old, we call 'em a yearling. And then we could have yearling steers out there that are grazing, but that's gonna take the place of a cow. I mean, we have to, we have to move our numbers back. We can't have as many cows out there producing calves if we have these yearling yearling steers out there or heifers or whatever. So there is a balancing act that ranchers do of the available forage and the economics and you know, what, what's the best decision for them to do.

Vance Crowe [00:30:08] So you had said originally when you buy the cow, you're buying it at about a thousand dollars and then she can be around for about five years in the herd producing calves. What do you sell those calves for when they go, when, when you pick 'em up after they've been weaned, what does a calf go for these days?

Gina Snyder [00:30:26] A calf goes for, I mean, we're pretty happy if we get like $900 for a calf. That's our, that's our economics. There's a lot of people that, you know, it's a 12, I mean, you get 12 up to $1,200 depending on the year, depending on the markets. You know, a lot of times you don't know what you're gonna get until you bring 'em to the sales ring, which is kind of nerve wracking because you don't know what your budget's gonna be for the next year. But we could get, yeah, $900. But if you look at the costs that go into that, you know, producers are only making a hundred or $200 a calf a lot of times.

Vance Crowe [00:31:04] Oh. So it's costing you seven, $800 to, to be able to raise that calf up with

Gina Snyder [00:31:10] What's,

Vance Crowe [00:31:11] What's that cost from the hay or

Gina Snyder [00:31:14] The hay? And I had a whole breakdown here for you and I can't find it. It's the hay, it's the mineral, it's the vet bill for the cow, the vet bill for the cals. We have to pay for the grass. I mean the grass isn't just out here for free. We either have a land payment or we lease the pasture. I mean, most of our stuff is actually leased. So you have, you pay, you know, $25 up to, I've heard a lot higher in other areas. You know, we're at that $25, 20 to $25 an A UM and an a UM is an animal unit month. So, so that cow with her small calf is one a UM and you pay for that pasture, you pay $25 for her to graze for one month. And there's a, there's a forage equivalent to that too. So you kind of figure that she's going to eat like 30 pounds of forage a day. So it's a, it's a real loose term to be able to equate that those, those 20 acres or a hundred acres down to the forage value of that. So I don't know if that was

Vance Crowe [00:32:34] Yeah, this is awesome. I didn't know anything at all about AUMs. So does this mean that like you're going around to your neighbors or the people that own the land near you and you're saying, Hey, we've got 30 cow calf pears that we wanna run here. So Right. You know, and then they say, yes, and we have this many acres and if we're gonna do it for three months, then this is what the payment is over that amount of time. Is that approximately how it

Gina Snyder [00:32:58] Works? That's, yeah, that's, that's a, that's a good ex explanation of it. You know, we run, you know, and then that's also takes into account on a dry year. Like this morning my husband's actually taking some cows to the sales ring because we need to redo our AUMs. We don't have as much forage out there. So if we have a lease and it's a dry year and we can only get say, 90 AUMs off of that pasture versus two or 300 in a good year, then we're only paying for that forage and not by the acre, which you can pay by the acre too. We do have some of those leases. Actually our biggest lease is by the acre and it's just a, an average of what that forage value is gonna be.

Vance Crowe [00:33:48] And then you were talking about taking 'em into the sales barn and like going to an auction. If you don't have anything on the, on the table as an exciting event, it's

Gina Snyder [00:33:56] Yeah, because it's

Vance Crowe [00:33:57] Just like, things are like bang bang, bang, they're going out, you know, money is changing hands.

Gina Snyder [00:34:01] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:34:01] But the, I would imagine that if you guys are feeling drought pressure or there's not as much water and you, you know, there's not as much forage, there's probably quite a few people that are saying, ah, we don't have the AUMs. Right. So then you've got everybody going to the sale barn and trying to sell, meaning there's a lot more supply and people can be either chooser or pay less for them. Is that accurate right now?

Gina Snyder [00:34:23] Exactly. And so that's, you know, when, when guys are going through drought and they're going to sell their their cow, it's gonna be, i, I don't expect to get a thousand dollars for those cows that are going today. They're gonna be going at a slaughter price. We tried to pick out the ones that are open that don't have a calf in 'em right now that for whatever reason and to sell them. So your salvage value on a thousand dollars plus cow, I mean it's up to fif, you know, 15 is probably more accurate. A thousand dollars is pretty low, but say your salvage value value is gonna be probably 60 to 70 cents a pound. So the, the easy math way, like to use a thousand is, you know, she's worth $700 when you go and sell her again. So you're not getting your money back out. Especially when there are so many cows that are going through at the time. So, so there's that economics in there too. And we, we do our best to, you know, by, by lower priced cows. So we don't have that much of a loss when they're open. But,

Vance Crowe [00:35:31] You know, it strikes me that most husband and wife, pears living in the United States don't have, have to have regular conversations about the value of the things that they own all the time. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about like how, how do you guys work together to figure out, hey, this is, this is the decision we need to make, you know, 'cause you could have one person that's really hopeful looking at the skies waiting for rain, and you could have somebody else that doesn't. So how, how do you make these kind of decisions as a pair?

Gina Snyder [00:36:01] We've had the conversation a lot of times that I don't know what people that don't have businesses together, what they talk about. It's like we don't, we don't know how Yeah. Somebody who's a doctor and somebody who's a lawyer, what do you talk about? But

Vance Crowe [00:36:18] Your coworkers,

Gina Snyder [00:36:20] Your coworkers I guess. Yeah, and we already, I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:36:23] We

Gina Snyder [00:36:23] Are our coworkers I guess. So it's, we sit down and look at numbers, you know, our, we kind of divide, divide things a little bit. I mean it's, we make all of our big decisions together. But, you know, I I guess it's, I'm kind of typical and that I, I kind of keep the books and stuff. I keep track of where our money's going and what our budget is looking like. And we definitely sit down and we talk about that together. We have discovered that machinery is something that we don't, that we, we have to be on the same page. I mean, we, we are on the same page about that. And you know, he's the one that's running the equipment most of the time. I mean, I'm in the tractor when I'm needed. We also have, have four capable children that help us. The olders two especially. So I'm in the office a lot more than I used to be, but we make those decisions together. It's a lot of communication, a lot of, you know, he, he does a lot of the, the day-to-day things and I, I do a lot of the office things and we, we talk about, we talk about what's going on and where we need to go and, and what our goals are. And you definitely have to have the same vision about how to run an operation. And that's,

Vance Crowe [00:37:45] So we started this by talking about you going to a class, the, the Ranching for Profit class. I've actually heard people talk about this class quite a few times in different scenarios while I've been traveling around the country. What, what hard changes did you have to make after taking that class that were, that were the ones that were like, we don't wanna do this, but we know we really have to.

Gina Snyder [00:38:06] Changing that calving date was probably our biggest one. And it's really, it's kind of interesting when you step back and think about it. We were trying to force these animals to, to calve in earlier in the year. And that the trend was, you know, that bigger calf that if you cal earlier in the year, when at the end of the year you're gonna have a bigger calf. Right. Just that, that growth, because we do sell by the pound, but we changed that calving date because it's more in sync with what mother nature does. I mean, the deer are fawning in June and because if you look at the quality of the forage throughout the year, it matches the nutritional needs of that cow or the deer or whatever, wildlife a lot better. It's kind of an interesting, I'll have to maybe put it up on Twitter or something if I can find that forage chart of how the nutritional quality of grass changes through the year. So anyway, the, the change of the calving season was probably one of our biggest because it's easy to let the bull out later, but you can't really go backwards. I mean, you can't undo that by letting it out earlier because just the way she cycles, she's only gonna have one calf a year. And you can't move that up as easy as you can move it back.

Vance Crowe [00:39:30] Well, you said something there that I think would be really surprising to people, right? Like, because if you're not in ag, you don't actually think about, there are a bunch of mamas or potential mamas out in a field, and in order to get them to calve, you then take a bull, right?

Gina Snyder [00:39:45] And

Vance Crowe [00:39:45] Put it out there and then you say like, we know what's gonna happen, nature's gonna happen. That bull is gonna go around and, and make all those potential mamas into mamas. And when you let that bull out, there is the, the determinator, the determiner of when are they gonna calf, right? And a lot of people right now, calf, you know, if you're watching Twitter, it's like in the middle of February they're going out, it is absolutely cold as could possibly be, you know, drop and they're, and they're getting calves out, but you're saying, Hey, we're moving around when the gestation period, how, how long between when a a cow gets pregnant does she have her calf?

Gina Snyder [00:40:21] Oh, I should know these days off the top of my head, and I don't, I mean, there's a specific amount of days, but it's, you know, that nine and a half months

Vance Crowe [00:40:28] It is nine and a half months. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

Gina Snyder [00:40:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:31] But I mean, like, I think that these are the factors that like, seem so natural to people that are in the ag world, but to like really think through the details of, oh, you, you've gotta get pregnant. Right? It's not,

Gina Snyder [00:40:41] It

Vance Crowe [00:40:42] Doesn't just happen by, by happenstance.

Gina Snyder [00:40:45] Yeah. Yep. And we all have our, you know, our calculators, there's, you know, there's little charts and stuff of okay, you let the bull out on, you know, June 18th or whatever, and it's gonna be, you know, an April, I, I, I can't know it off the top of my head, but you know, early April cal or, you know, ours is, we let 'em out, you know, first part of August. So then we're looking at that may, you know, that may to May 15th kind of kind of calving date, so whatever those days come out at. But

Vance Crowe [00:41:15] What makes a good bull? Why do you choose one bull over another to put out in your pasture?

Gina Snyder [00:41:21] Well, we usually have the vet come and test them, and that, I guess that would be the number one thing is if it tests well, that it is fertile. Because if you don't have a fertile bowl, then you're not gonna have a calf. But, you know, you, you look at,

Vance Crowe [00:41:37] So does that mean he does like a sperm count? He goes in there and, and, okay, interesting. Yep,

Gina Snyder [00:41:42] Yep. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. So then they'll do a soundness exam too. I mean, you, he has to be healthy and the sperm count and that kind of stuff. Other things that we look for is just the, I dunno, the look of the cow that there's the genetics. A lot of 'em are the bull, excuse me, the, there's genetics that are good for growth, good for, there's a lot of, there's a trend for marbling. There's, there's a lot of things that you, that you look at. But definitely that sperm count is number one in my mind, because you need that. You won't have anything if you don't have that. So,

Vance Crowe [00:42:23] So you look out on the horizon, you and your husband and your kids are, you know, made changes to, to farm for profit, to be able to stay in the business. When you look out into the future, what are you worried about? What is the thing that keeps you up at night or makes you guys say like, we've gotta be saving for a rainy day because these potential eventualities could come true?

Gina Snyder [00:42:44] We've talked a little bit about the, the eat less meat trend that I think people are really misinformed about. And I, I, I wish that we had maybe a celebrity or somebody, I mean, we need something that's a little higher pri profile than, than me to go out there and say that this is, this is a good thing. We need, we need to trend.

Vance Crowe [00:43:05] Well, did you see on Twitter yesterday, there was a video floating around of some guy, I have no idea who he is, who was talking about that tick that bites people, that makes them allergic to meat. And he was saying, you know, like, this might actually be a good way to reduce meat. I don't think there were very many people out there being like, yeah, that's what we should do. We should have people do tick bite stuff.

Gina Snyder [00:43:26] It is absolutely terrifying though. I mean, I mean, you, you think about, I mean, I've, I've heard of people that have actually been bit by that tick and can't eat red meat. I've I've heard of that. That's a real thing. But that's just terrifying. That's, that's just, you know, I don't like that people eat meat, so I'm gonna make them all allergic to it that Yeah, no, I saw that this morning actually. And the,

Vance Crowe [00:43:50] The one thing you have going for you is people love beef, right? Good beef tastes great and, and like the, the, it's not something you're gonna be able to out teach people. I mean, I think one of the reasons that the reduction of red meat is a part of a lot of these movements is I think a lot of religious movements require people to make a sacrifice that they don't want to make. And the reason that is because then it creates an ingroup and an outgroup. And as far as a dietary restriction, if you really wanna prove who is an, an ardent supporter, well then make them give up, you know, the something they love best thing, you know, the thing that they love. It's asking them to do that. And I think, you know, I, I definitely believe there's going to be a rise in religious movements over time for people that have meaning. But I think that that requirement is one that is going to severely limit how much people wanna do it, particularly Westerners.

Gina Snyder [00:44:48] Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting thought. I don't know. I don't know. I, yeah, that's an interesting thought. I, I wish that we could get a, a religious movement towards eating meat for the planet. So

Vance Crowe [00:45:00] I think that's what Christianity was for, for a very long, long time actually, you know, many, many religions. Gina, this has been such an interesting conversation. If, if people wanted to do the thing that you talked to me about in Twitter and, and you mentioned about your friends, if they did want to get a farmer to raise them, a cow to be able to slaughter it so that they could do that thing, what is the right way to do that? What's the way to make that possible?

Gina Snyder [00:45:30] Well, you have to talk to somebody for a couple years in advance, that's for sure. I mean, you have to, that they have to have a lot of planning. But there are a lot of, of, there are a lot of people that are starting to do that. And we actually did do that for a little while as we, we were raising our own beef and selling it by the package locally, but there was a lot of hiccups that we had to, you know, overcome in that. And, and we really kind of came to the conclusion that that was not, not our thing. There's much, there are people that much better at doing that. And we, we had the problem of trying to find A-U-S-D-A processor because if we wanted to send it, I mean, we're so close to the North Dakota border that I could not go to a farmer's market in North Dakota with my product because it was a Montana certified plant and not A-U-S-D-A certified processor. So there's, there's just a lot of these little hiccups that are along that process that, that you have to do. But if they wanted to, they, they need to talk to a rancher. And if they are not willing to raise one, they can find somebody that, that is. And I, I am completely in love with the idea of that farm to fork idea. I really am. It's just not as practical as, as we would like it to be. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:46:56] I'm glad you said that because I think for most people they just kind of have this sense of like, oh, you're a rancher, you raise cows, therefore you can just kind of go out into the field and cut it up and Right

Gina Snyder [00:47:05] Then

Vance Crowe [00:47:05] We've got beef. And so I think it's good for people to say, Hey, there are a lot of roles in this chain and we're playing one further back that it doesn't Yeah,

Gina Snyder [00:47:13] It doesn't

Vance Crowe [00:47:13] Make sense to do this. Yep.

Gina Snyder [00:47:14] We are at the very beginning of the chain. We have, we have a 500 pound calf to sell and that's, I mean, the, the slaughter weight of a steer is at that 1200 pounds. So that calf that we are selling has a long ways to go before it's ready for your freezer. And I am, I am thrilled that people are wanting to do that. I, you know, the, the bright spot in this whole COVID food chain hiccups that we've seen is that people are going, oh wait, how does that work? How come we don't have it in the grocery store right now? So I guess that's the bright spot in this whole last year and a half is people are realizing that we have a really fragile system. Honestly, we're very efficient, but it's very fragile. I mean, the, a little hiccup in one plant in the middle of South Dakota, I mean, people couldn't show up to work. And we saw this whole lag in the pork and beef, and people were scared that they weren't gonna get it in their grocery stores. And, and even our little grocery store that is in the middle of beef country, she ha that's the system that she had was to get it from a supplier. Well, here she is in cow calf country and she wasn't sure if she was gonna get her beef for that week. And, you know, and that's just, there's something wrong with that system. I, it, you know, I, I understand the efficiency of it, that's great. But there's something wrong that some little hiccup in one plant can throw the whole thing off.

Vance Crowe [00:48:50] Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the scars of COVID that will, will hang on is that, I mean, I, from now on will always have Brush Creek farms, ring brothers, other people that, that can help me get beef when I want it, right. Because I'll never be in that position again. I will never let my family do it. I will pass that on to my children, because as you said, efficiency's great, cheap prices are amazing. It's done fantastic things, but when you, when the system is so easy to break down, that's a danger to us all. So I, I am really glad you brought that up. Well, Gina, this has been a wonderful conversation. If people wanted to interact with you on Twitter and, and chat with you, where would they go to do that?

Gina Snyder [00:49:31] You know, I don't know what my whole, my whole thing is. It's Last Chance Ranch at any mt. Blue sky, I believe. Something like that.

Vance Crowe [00:49:41] We will, it is, it's at NEMT, blue Sky. And I will definitely put a link into that, into the show notes. Gina Snyder, thank you so much for coming on. Okay.

Gina Snyder [00:49:52] Thanks for having me. It was fun.