LA JUNTA — Standing in the auctioneer’s booth at the La Junta Winter Livestock auction barn, longtime rancher and auctioneer John Campbell has watched as pen after pen of cattle have been steered into the ring and sold — two or three months ahead of their normal auction time.
Late spring and the summer months, Campbell says, usually are slow times for cattle sales, but little rain and high temperatures have left rangeland and pastures in poor condition.
“The conditions are making it so ranchers are selling more pairs (cattle and calves) at a time when we don’t usually see these sales. It’s all drought related,” Campbell said in late June.
Campbell said the auction has been selling anywhere from 300 to 600 pairs a week since late May. That’s almost three times the number of cattle usually sold this time of year.
The selling of cows is significant because they produce more cattle each year for ranchers. Selling a cow is the ranching equivalent of selling machinery at a manufacturing plant.
“That’s business that we wish we weren’t doing,” Campbell said. “When these guys are selling the factory at auction, then we are losing potential customers for next year.”
Campbell said that five ranchers were scheduled to sell their entire herd at a recent sale.
“There’s no grass and there’s no moisture, so there is no place to turn the cattle out,” Campbell said, “and it is cost-prohibitive with the high commodity prices just to feed the cattle through the summer at a time of year when cattle are typically turned out on native grass pasture.
“There has been no grass produced because of the lack of moisture over a large geographic area, and the consequence of that is having to sell these pairs.”
Jace Honey, who runs the La Junta Livestock Commission, said ranchers at his sale barn are holding their cattle, hoping for conditions to improve.
Honey said his sale barn is selling nearly 1,000 cattle a week, compared with 400 to 500 last year at this time.
“It’s always small this time of year. If the moisture doesn’t come quick, the sales will climb,” Honey said.
Campbell said the problem in his sale area is spread across Colorado and New Mexico.
“New Mexico is actually harder hit than Colorado,” he said.
Campbell and Honey said this year is not as bad for ranchers as the 2002 drought.
“We also don’t have the number of cattle to start with as we did that year,” Campbell said. “The cow numbers are substantially less than they were in 2002. So there is less cattle to come to town.”
Winter Livestock sells cattle from eastern Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, and the entire state of Colorado. Campbell said the current drought in New Mexico is worse than the one in 2002.
“There are spots in Colorado where it has rained, whereas in 2002 it didn’t rain anywhere,” he said.
Campbell said he didn’t anticipate the season to be so dry.
“A little bit of a salvation is that we had an extremely good summer last year and an open winter, so we made a lot of grass last year, and there was a lot of grass inventory (that) for the most part carried over into the spring of 2008. What we are seeing now is that the carry-over grass is being depleted because of the dry weather and especially the hot, dry winds,” Campbell said.
Honey said that heavy snowpack has let irrigated farms raise more feed than in 2002.
Campbell said he noticed higher sales in early May.
Ranchers across the valley are reducing stocking rates to a more manageable level.
“Nobody wants to sell, but they have to,” Campbell said, noting that every rancher has a different threshold.
“I have talked to some people that are just going to buy feed regardless of the cost, and they’ll feed their cattle until the end of the summer and then sell calves and cows. Other people are choosing to reduce cattle numbers as they go,” he said. “Everybody’s situation is different. The only common denominator is that it is dry.”
