REGINA – With the trend toward larger and fewer cattle finishers, there will be more calls for small feedlot operators to provide specialized services, a Saskatchewan feedlot operator says.
To stay competitive, many western Canadian feedlots will expand to feed 25,000 to 40,000 cattle per year, Brad Wildeman, general manager of the Pound-Maker feedlot in Lanigan, Sask., told a seminar held in Regina recently.
Labor and machinery costs are lower in a larger feedlot, but the main force pushing feedlots to grow is demand from large buyers for consistent, high volume supplies, Wildeman said.
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Going toe-to-toe
“In order to do business with these larger companies, it’s volume you have to have,” he said. Large feedlots can supply the steady stream of cattle they want.
The key to survival for smaller feedlots will be feeding cattle that larger feedlots don’t want, he said.
“If you’re a small operator and you want to stand toe to toe with these large operations, you’re going to have trouble,” Wildeman said. “But they don’t want to feed heifers, they don’t want to feed light cattle, they want uniform genetics.”
To keep labor costs down, large feedlot operators will likely want all the cattle they buy to weigh at least 800 pounds. Anything smaller demands more attention, Wildeman said.
Many feedlots once fed cattle at 600 pounds through to finish, or fed both heifers and steers. But today, “anything that requires special attention they’re just not interested in anymore. They just don’t have the manpower to cover it,” he said.
In some large feedlots only one pen rider is needed for every 8,000 cattle. But that would be impossible if the lot was feeding calves, he said. This opens a good niche for background feeders, who take cattle from 600 pounds or less and feed them up to 800 pounds, Wildeman said.
Difficult to tailor feed rations
For larger animal feeders, an 800-pound animal will be fed rations of 80 percent grains and 20 percent silage. But calves need 70 percent silage and only 30 percent grain, making it difficult for large scale feedlot operators to bring in enough silage supplies.
Smaller lots can use their own land to produce the silage and the large amounts of manure – silage produces more manure than grain – will be returned to the land as fertilizer, Wildeman said.
