We had an incredible cattle sale this weekend. We sold 1,078 for $3,950,699.24. It was amazing and I can’t even explain how well deserved this is for the cow/calf producer. It has been many years coming. My mom recalls having a steer calf in the top pen at the Sales Barn and it went for .41 cents per lb. This was a good price in the days when we were co-mingling cattle. At the same time though, you could likely buy a jug of gas for $3.00! Canada Post is challenging us to get the producer cheques out, but we have been very successful at signing up a bunch of producers for direct deposit. We have heard a lot of positive feedback on our renovated facilities and drive-through unload. Thank you – I personally am very proud of the board and think they have done an outstanding job of making our facility top-notch. The cattle that went through the place this week were also very good, and the producers deserve a pat on the back for raising great animals. I am also very proud of the staff. They worked very hard to keep cattle flowing and not mixing up any animals entering and leaving. We had a group at the end of the sale that went out of their way to correct a minor mistake with a bull in the wrong pen. It was corrected and adjusted properly. With today’s prices a mistake could be very costly and something we need to avoid. We had a few new faces join our staff. There are some young kids out there that can’t wait to turn 14 so they can work at the sales barn!
I had an incident with my old truck! My friends had borrowed my cattle trailer and after they hauled their cattle to the sales barn, they dropped it off at the Research Station on Thursday. I had booked Thursday and Friday afternoon off so at lunch I was hooking up the trailer and backed in and needed to move over slightly so I jumped in and went and ahead and backed up. This time I wasn’t quite all the way back, so I jumped back into the truck and grabbed the gear shift, and it just fell. ‘Oh, great,’ I was thinking. I was in the way of accessing the trailer by anything else and didn’t know if I should move my truck that was stuck in park. My worker and I looked under the hood – we really didn’t know what we were looking for but… We made a few calls and then I looked at my watch and thought, well I knew my friend Will would still be on his lunch, so I called him. He arrived quickly and immediately went underneath the truck. He said, “do you have a wire?” I went and found a piece, but he said it was way too big and that it needed to be tiny. I headed to my drawer of twist ties (for sandwich bags in the old days) and he said that was perfect. A clip had broken, and he wired it up and I was good to go! I didn’t want to push my luck with the wire, so I went home and switched over to my new truck, and I was good to go. I thought about taking my old truck but envisioned being stuck in the new drive through unload at the Sales Barn and everybody mad at me!
