“These are the times that try men's souls.” | Justbad, I'm going to bust you down on this a little. I asked earlier if you were in FFA? Are you? If not you should be, or at least 4-H beef program to help you figure costs, opportunity costs, etc. That why I told you earlier you need to be taking economics in school. It is clear you have only been really looking at final income dollars closer than total costs to get finished product. Opportunity costs are real and very costly in a operation. After reading your posts into this thread it looks as if you caught on about figuring all costs even if free, because that free feed could have been sold at a dollar cost figure. Somebody gave up income to give you free feed.
Again I will tell you like Garvo said, get to town and go to the Dollar Store and buy a few packs of #2 pencils. You need to be wearing a few more of them out at night. Till the point you ask yourself should I sell that feed to Joe down the road vs. buying more gummer cows? One good lesson would be for you to do a walk around the family farmstead and do a total inventory of everything from used nuts & bolts to used tires, even scrap metal. I'm betting you have something in a pile that you think isn't worth anything to your operation. You are wrong it has value, maybe not that day or hour, but down the road it has value because everything of no value becomes valuable once it is put into a pile and increases in mass.
In a lot of your posts you talk about borrowing money. Well I would like you to see what you could come up with on farmstead to sell to buy cows instead of borrowing to buy cows. I remember early on my career as an equipment salesman's I learned this valuable lesson from a good old boy I dealt with. It seems the bank was getting after him on a bank note he had with them, he wasn't delinquent but bankers was getting a little worried. The farmer/rancher asked for some money to do something, the banker told him no. He needed the note paid off before he would help him. The banker thinking the guy didn't have any money on had to get debit paid off. While short story, the rancher walked back into the bank two week later paid the note off. The banker asked him where he got the money to pay debt off, the rancher replied well I just kicked the corners a little and came up with the money. The banker was dumbfounded as to where the money came from. I asked the rancher where he got the money from, he told me he cleaned a few grain bins out, sold a few calves he was feeding, sold some scrap metal. He came up with the money to pay note off.
I'm going to post a picture on here of something on my range ground after a pipeline project came though. It is a pic of rocks I made pipeline pile up. Well I run this ground with two other ranchers, we each have our own deeded acres here. But we run them in common and pay all bills together, also share the workload as to running cattle on it. What do you make of the rocks? Are they of any value to you, would you like them to be given to you? Would you take them if I gave them to you? Post back here and tell me your thoughts on these pile of rocks.
Edited by Russ In Idaho 2/22/2014 05:46
 (Rocks.jpg)
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