Cattle sale sees high prices

The weather may have been cold but the prices were fairly hot during the Rainy River Cattlemen Association’s annual fall calf sale Saturday at the Stratton sales yard.
Bids went as high as $1.94/lb on the lightweight calves, with several of the more heavier cattle being sold at $1.50/lb. or higher.
RRCA president Peter Spuzak said the general range of the middle weight calves (400-500 pounds) was between $1.30-$1.40/lb–up quite a bit from last year’s sale.
That works out to about $520-$700 per animal. And with just over 1,500 head of cattle, that means close to $1 million changed hands over the course of the sale.
“We’ve not seen the 400-500 weight with that consistency,” Spuzak said. “And there was good quality cattle–most of the cattle coming in there were good cattle.”
Spuzak believed there were several reasons why Saturday’s sale saw such strong prices, starting with the fact feed prices across Canada are low right. There’s an abundance of grain, he said, and most of it isn’t geared towards human consumption.
Also, while the amount of rainfall this year made many aspects of farming difficult, it left beef producers with very good pasture conditions.
“It was an excellent opportunity to put some gain on the cattle,” Spuzak said, noting even now there’s still a fair bit of pasture available for cattle to graze.
Spuzak also gave a lot of credit to the feeder co-ops set up across the country for making the bidding market more competitive.
“Farmers are buying back their own cattle,” he said. “The co-ops in this country–30 in Ontario–gives the opportunity for the farmer to have some money to work with to put some gain on their cattle.
“They can buy cattle underneath co-op loans and the security is on the cattle–not a mortgage on their house or tractor,” he explained. “Come spring time, they could have added another $300 value on that animal, which is not bad for a winter’s work.
“You add all those things together and it goes straight to the cattle market [prices],” he noted.
Meanwhile, work still continues on trying to get a ring scale for the Stratton sales yard.
Spuzak said the RRCA is supposed to hear something back from the Northern Ontario Heritage Funding Corp. late this fall to see if it will be getting any assistance, setting the project back another year.
At the urging of local MP Bob Nault, now minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the RRCA also is looking into getting some FedNor money.
Spuzak said the ring scale would offer more efficiency during the sale, giving the buyers the cattle’s weights as soon as they step into the auction ring.
But installing the scale would only be part of the improvement project at the sales yard.
“The whole system will be tailored to handling cattle for the new scale,” Spuzak said. “Once the new system is in place, it will eliminate about four or five steps.
“There’s a lot of things that can be done there to the facility but we want to work it around the new scale,” he remarked.
Regardless of what support the RRCA can get from government, Spuzak said the plan is to have a ring scale put in next summer “no matter what happens.”
“We have three sales now that are good, strong healthy sales,” he said. “It gives you room to say, ‘Let’s do this and let’s do that’ to accommodate the district even better.”