VERMILION, Alta. – Buying cattle at an auction isn’t for the faint of heart or inexperienced, says a former order buyer.
It’s a fast paced game with no rules and plenty of shoving in the corners, Peggy Checkel said at the Grazing School for Women conference.
Checkel earned her credentials by drinking stale coffee, sitting on hard benches and keeping her elbows up when the auctioneer started the bidding.
“There’s lots of games played and there are no rules.”
Checkel was lucky. In the beginning she was taken under the wing of some older buyers who taught her how to survive and thrive in the cattle buying game where a few bad moves can leave a buyer holding thousands of dollars worth of unwanted cattle.
Read Also
Growth plates are instrumental in shaping a horse’s life
Young horse training plans and workloads must match their skeletal development. Failing to plan around growth plates can create lifelong physical problems.
The first year as a buyer you get quite a few “spankings,” said Checkel, the first female order buyer in Canada.
Experienced order buyers know how to run up cattle prices a few cents higher than market price and then quit, leaving the inexperienced buyer owning expensive cattle.
“You get to know who’s ramming and jamming you.”
Pushing expensive cattle right back at the other buyer is the only way to survive, she said.
“I want to shove cattle up his butt right out the chute so he’ll leave me alone,” said Checkel, who has had established order buyers run down the stairs waving their bidding cards and screaming at her when they ended up with high-priced cattle.
“You just smile,” she told the women.
There is a pecking order among buyers. It’s clear within the first 10 minutes of an auction which buyers have orders for cattle and the money to back the play.
Checkel told the women that before they buy cattle at an auction, they need to spend a few weeks sitting in the stands to understand the auctioneer’s chatter, learn the prices, develop an eye for the cattle and know who else is bidding on the same cattle.
In the first year she watched local cattle producers who buy cattle once or twice a year have their prices driven higher by order buyers. First she thought it wasn’t fair ball, but later realized new buyers didn’t know the market and were unknowingly running prices higher on the cattle the buyers needed to fill their orders.
“They would blow cattle out of the market,” she said.
Checkel told the women to be patient at an auction. Don’t bid on the first offer thrown out by an auctioneer and don’t be the one to start off the auction. It’s the auctioneer’s job to get the most money for the cattle and they can easily pick out a nervous player and have her upping her own bids.
“He’ll run the heck out of you if he has a chance,” she said.
“If he knows you’re a greenhorn, he knows you will say nothing.”
Auctioneer Bryon Wolters, brought to the conference to create a mock auction, took two simultaneous bids from a woman during the classroom auction to prove a point.
“I can tell you didn’t know if you were in or not. It’s up to you to figure it out,” Wolters told the women after the mock bidding.
“Keep your attention focused when you’re spending your money,” he said.
Checkel said not to be afraid to ask the auctioneer to pull a calf from the ring if it looks sick. It’s often difficult to see a sick calf among a large group.
Once the auction is finished, it’s important to take a second look at the calves penned in the back to ensure all the animals are healthy. Auction markets have yard insurance to cover losses from cattle that need to be pulled because of illness, she said.
“Once you get them home, it’s hard to get an auction market to cover that calf.”
Buyers need to focus on the type of cattle they want, either short-keep calves for quick finish in the feedlot, lightweight cattle with little finish to put straight on grass or young breeding stock that could still finish in less than 30 months and be sold into the American beef market.
Checkel told the women to adjust their price depending on the animal’s flesh condition.
If the animals are going into a feedlot, it may be cheaper to buy fleshy animals with good weight on them, rather than buy expensive barley to get them finished.
If the animals are going straight to grass, don’t buy fleshy ones, she said.
“They’ll lose it in the first two weeks of grass.”
If the calves come in the ring straight off feed, lower your price. Conversely if they come into the ring looking shrunk and gaunt, you can afford to pay a few cents more, she said.
“Always keep looking at the cattle and listen to the auctioneer.”
Stick to your price range and don’t get carried away by bidding more than you plan, she said. A few cents more on every animal eats away profit.
Annette Morin of Edam, Sask., said she tried to buy cattle during the mock auction, but was too slow to raise her hand.
“I hesitated and shouldn’t have,” she said.
Tricia Stewart of Canwood, Sask., said having a mock auction and learning insider tips was a good exercise.
“Before, whenever I went there I never had a clue what was going on,” she said.
