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NW Iowa | Does Niman contract? I thought with them, you owned the livestock and they just provided the specialty market. But maybe they've changed things.
Contract feeding is about like politics. You can find about any possible opinion out there, and quite a few people will have extremely strong opinions one way or the other. My personal opinion is that contract feeding in the long run is a good thing. There will always be risk in doing business in any form, and this is no different of course. The good thing about it is you're not at the risk of the livestock markets and wildly swinging profit margins. The downside is you're not fully in control of whether or not you can sign a second third fourth contract in the future, other than just doing your job well and forcing them to at least want to keep you versus the next guy. There's some people that insist it's outrageous to take the risk of building a building and working that hard for someone else instead of yourself. On the other hand there's some people that build barns 15 20 years ago got them paid off and are still working hard for someone else and are taking money from their paid off barns and buying farmland with it. So from that perspective you actually are working hard for yourself, it's just that another party is also benefiting from your sweat. It's probably just a general attitude about life overall and not just about contract feeding versus owning your own livestock | |
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Contract growers
