Cattle

I reckon I shud poljize fer not be'n hyar the last cupla blog days, but thangs on the hom'frnt dun need my tenshun. Thet's wy thar wuzn't a blogspiel the last tahm er to.

So with that out of the way, let's move on to something Western for the most part - Cattle. I was searching around for some statistics and ran across the Market Report for week of Oct 18, 2013, on Slaughter Cattle in Utah. There were 1,275 steers weighing 1100-1300 lbs and 975 heifers weighing between 1000-1100 lbs slaughtered. The Dressed Carcasses weight was: Steers 600-900 lbs, Heifers 550-800 lbs, and the Prices were $200-203 for Steers and $199-202 for Heifers.

From that report, if you multiply the number of cattle slaughtered for the year you come up with 27,000.  Let's say the average is around 713 lbs per carcass and times that by 27,000 is 19,241,000 lbs of meat for sale if my arithmetic is correct.  That is less than 7 lbs per person in Utah. Where does the rest of the meat come from to feed the Utahns? Of course, it's imported from Australia or Argentina or wherever.    

And that isn't all I found:  The Annual Grazing Fee Report as of May 1, 2013, for Wyoming, Western Nebraska and Southwestern South Dakota. It states that "Summer grass lease prices are generally higher for the 2013 grazing season due to overall lack of availability. ................. This area is still in the stronghold of an extreme drought and producers are being cautious in terms of moisture. ............... More moisture is desperately needed to sustain this grazing season."

This is a small portion of what is available on a site called cattletoday.com and I know those in the cattle business know about this already, but maybe some Western writers will find the site interesting. It has many subjects available and a whole host of sites to find info you may be looking for for some reason or another.

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