Pricing
There are many, many things that determine how cattle are priced. Sometimes there is a base rate plus, sometimes a formula, sliding scales, cash price, future price, heifer vs steer, time of the year, price of corn, etc, etc. Most often it seems to be pretty confusing and was probably designed by the same financial geniuses that brought our economy to where it is today. It's our opinion that if you can't explain something or if it's so complicated that your eyes glaze over, it's probably not a good thing.
We simply let the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) set the price. In the USA commodities are traded daily on the CME. Feeder cattle is one of those commodities and we think that the price established by tens of thousands of pounds of trades across the nation are fair to both the buyer and seller. Basically it's the biggest auction barn in the US. And it's easy to look up the the prices. You can find the prices online, on TV, or in the newspaper.
We use the previous day's closing price for the current month to set the price. The CME price is expressed per hundred weight (cwt) not per pound so don't let a price of 144.5 scare you. It simply means $144.5 per 100 pounds of weight or $1.445/pound not $144.50/pound. So if you come out to the ranch and settle on a calf all we need to do is multiply yesterday's closing price for feeders by the animals weight to determine the price. That price is good for today; not tomorrow, not next week, nor next month. Pretty simple.
Availability
Sorry but all our steers are spoken for. We won't have any available until spring 2013. | 
