Cattle buyers can be assured of one thing at Whitewood Livestock Sales’ presorted calf sales this fall.
All the calves on offer at the Saskatchewan auction mart will be age verified.
Manager Rhett Parks said he decided to insist on that when setting his fall sale schedule.
“When times are tough, I’ve got to get every dollar and every cent for my customers,” he said Sept. 23, a day after the first sale.
It’s too early to tell if bringing age verified calves to market will result in better prices but Parks believes it could bring more buyers.
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
“The way I see it, it might be an extra bid on some classes of cattle,” he said. “I don’t see any downside.”
Some buyers may not be able to bid at all if the calves aren’t age verified, he added.
“We don’t want to have to turn them away because they can’t find age verified calves,” Parks said.
Keith Montgomery, a cattle buyer from Wapella, Sask., said age verification prevents problems further down the line. His customers are starting to ask for such cattle.
“The people who feed them to fat can possibly get a better bid from the packer and there’s no problem crossing the line as short keeps,” he said. “It makes it easier down the road.”
Montgomery also said it’s important at a sale to keep age verified cattle separate from those that aren’t.
“The person who (age verified) should get paid a bit for that,” he said, adding that he believes there will eventually be a price premium.
Both Montgomery and Parks said age verification doesn’t take a lot of time at the farm level.
Parks and his field men worked through the summer to get the word out and give producers as much notice as possible. The Sept. 22 sale saw a light run of about 500 calves.
The company has even helped age verify calves for producers who aren’t comfortable working on computers.
“I thought long and hard about it,” Parks said. “The easiest thing would be to run regular pre-sort sales and not worry about age verification whatsoever.”
But he said he didn’t want his customers to miss the chance of more bids, better prices or a possible government program that will pay more for age verified calves.
