What are the adv and disadv of backgrounding beef cattle?

Answer 1

Advantages:

• Makes use of excellent-growing areas/locations where forage is almost always of good quality.
• Can sell high and buy low
• Low labour costs because of no planning needed for calving, breeding and weaning
• Have the option of keeping back one or two animals for one's own freezer
• Have the option of selling after a few months (i.e., after grazing season) so one doesn't have to plan or buy/make feed for the winter
• Can buy as many as you want and sell as many as you want pretty well any time according to pasture health and growth season
• For cow-calf producers, have the option of retaining offspring and backgrounding them until the markets are right.
• Lower feed costs as far as amount of feed to feed is concerned.
• Lower stocking rate for pasture: can have twice as many stockers for a pasture than you can with cows
• Great option for farms who rely on cash crops for primary income who don't need the extra worry and labour associated with cow-calf

Disadvantages:

• Not much income is made because often you can be buying for as much money as you are selling them
• Cannot be raised in areas where there is naturally poorer quality forage
• Stockers are growing animals and require good, nutritive feed all the time they are living on the farm
• Risk of death loss and illness after buying animals from stockyard
• Often there is no health record that comes with these animals, so one has to vaccinate for everything applicable to that area and deworm as soon as they come to the farm.
• Can be quite noisy for a week or so since most calves that are being backgrounded have just been weaned
• Risk of finding a bull or two in the herd--extra cost and effort of having to find those bulls and castrate them.
• You cannot control the personality of the animals you buy: you will end up with some animals that are more flighty and nervous than others.
• For some farms, one also cannot control how uniform a stocker herd is when first purchased.
• High feed costs as far as striving to have the best quality feed as possible.
• Not a good idea to raise when feed costs are high and cattle prices are low.
• Backgrounding steers can be too boring for some, especially if they like the idea of working to have a cow-calf herd and the joy of seeing baby calves playing in the corrals and pastures, as well as the planning process that comes with having a cow-calf herd.
• Must sell the herd when prices are right--when to sell can be affected by external threats like international markets turning away from your country's beef market, a sudden herd health concern like BSE that has the potential of affecting all beef herds, etc.