Summary: The Beef Cattle Industry

The beef cattle industry is a way to make a lot of money, but only if you know how to play your cards. As most small family farms are being bought up by large commercial farms, it keeps getting harder and harder for the small farms to turn a dollar. Raising livestock is not for everyone, but it involves anyone who uses meat, milk, animal by-product, uses dog food, uses leather, and anything else to do with any animal. It takes years of learning, experience, and hard work to make a living in the beef industry, but you can reap many rewards. My family has raised cattle for four generations, and I have grown up around cattle my whole life. The idea of working hard to make a dollar has always been appealing to me, as it was to my father.

Beef and the beef production industry have played a crucial role in the foundation of America. Beef

You have to learn a lot of knowledge from trial and error, because everyone in the beef industry does things differently. There are two different sides of the beef industry. There is the cow-calf operations and the commercial, or “background” operations. On cow-calf operations, the owner of the farm breeds his cows and raises the calves until they are weaned from their mothers and ready to sell. The commercial operation usually purchase the calves at auction(Kramer, 2017). The purchased cattle typically weigh between 200-1000 pounds. Then the cattle are taken to the feedlot (where the operation is based out of) and vaccinated and then fed to start their journey of gaining weight. Then, what my family does, is raise the cattle to a weight of around 650-800 pounds and send them to a feedlot in Kinsley, Kansas (Kinsley Custom Cattle Feeding LLC), where they are then fed a different ration of feed to grow to the slaughter weight, and then they are sold to meat buyers from large organizations like Tyson’s (Snow, 2017). But more goes on during the average day on the