Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays is back talking with Oklahoma State University Extension Livestock Marketing Specialist Dr. Derrell Peel about wheat pasture prospects and stocker demand.
“There is always interest in grazing wheat in the fall,” Dr. Peel said. “If a producer is interested in forage, it’s about getting wheat in in late summer. It is always a race between summer temperatures, soil moisture conditions, and such.”
He described seeing a lot of farming going on in Northwest Oklahoma as he drove through recently. Anhydrous was being applied, ahead of planting proving their growing intent of planting for forage, as grain raisers don’t generally plant until late October.
At this point in the season, Dr. Peel says that there are still many questions to be answered. Will weather conditions allow for wheat pasture to grow? What will the stocker economics look like?
Dr. Peel said that experts have been anticipating the potential for heifer retention to return for over a year, so he says that it is possible that some of the heifers that will be grazing on wheat this winter could be replacements rather than stockers.
He hesitantly suggested that the industry would see some indication of heifer retention by the end of the year but admitted that there is no data to support that at this time. “Heifer slaughter rates are decreasing slightly, but they are still at high enough levels that suggest that we are still mostly feeding and eating heifers rather than saving them to go back into the herd,” he stated.
Dr. Peel has spent a lot of time studying where heifer retention is now compared to the last couple of cattle cycles and said that producers need to be aware of the fact that the heifer pipeline has been virtually emptied over the past six years. Because of that, rebuilding calf-producing herds will be a slow process.
“If we keep a heifer calf in ’24, we can potentially breed her in ’25, and she calves in ’26 into ’27. We are talking three years before we get any increase in beef production, so it is a lengthy process,” he said. “I think that is important in terms of how producers’ expectations are developing in terms of whether it’s worth keeping heifers yet.”
With how the 2023 and 2024 markets have been, producers have understandably been content to sell nearly everything they had, including the heifers. However, if the prices hold long enough, it is worth foregoing selling them now to keep them for future production.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
