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Latimer Iowa | Just tell me the price, I will empty my pockets!!!
Buying feeders and selling fats is very akin to being the renter of farmland. Due to competition for feeders (rentable farmland) there is not the opportunity to ever make much margin.
Owning the breeding stock (owned farmland) is the way to get ahead long term.
My dad and uncle fed a significant number of cattle bought and sold on the same market in the late 1970's and made a pile of money, kept doing the same strategy and by 1985 were 100% custom feeding because there was no money left. Eventually we had lost enough money on the turn before they couldn't get capital to buy the next turn. We custom fed until about 1998 and then started buying our own again, buy and sell on the same market, make it back where you lost it, never lost money feeding cattle, just sold the corn for 50 cents a bushel, etc..... I did closeouts on the 24,000 head we fed from 2002-2013 and if we charged/assessed a market price for corn/feed, and charged the yardage we would have gotten custom feeding, we averaged losing $71.80 per head on everything that went through our lots. By then our facilities and their bodies were getting worn out so we exited feeding cattle out and buying and selling on the same market. Overall farm profitability has improved since. This is not a story unique to us, look at how many farmer feeders and sale barns exist now as compared to 40 years ago...
If it is your passion to buy and sell at the same market (rent farmland) it is not necessarily a business decision. Is it a business or a passion? Anyone can delude themselves into thinking anything is sustainable if they are willing to massage numbers and have deep enough pockets to weather the lows to get to the highs.
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Sell/buy marketing?
