By  E. W. Lang

Butter ended the week up 11 cents per lb. from last Friday’s close, hay is up and cows are expensive. Read on about the cost of showing beef cattle, as it makes cow milking look like a good living. I also offer a few thoughts for those who didn’t sell milk at the high a few days ago.

Block cheese was down 18 cents for the week at $1.61 per lb. Barrels lost 18 cents as well and closed at $1.39. Butter closed at $1.40.

February Class III Milk Futures are $16.48 per cwt. from last Friday, and that’s not too far off of the contract low of $15.89 in August. Feb. was $16.16 on December 3 and poked through $20 for a few minutes on January 11 of this year.

For those of you who feel you blew any chance for prosperity by not selling at the recent $20 high set 11 days ago, remember that no one can do that with any regularity or accuracy, and no one can predict the market. There was a guy here in Iowa who won the lottery six times, but he’s now lost his job at the lottery and is serving four to 25 in the state pen with his brothers, a former judge from Texas.  The lottery and a commodity market aren’t of similar mechanism, but you can see how someone’s apparent ability to see and know all things can bring wealth and also have an unfortunate trade-off because something was awry.   

March Class III lost $1.53 this week, after a gain of 17 cents today, and April lost $1.11 per lb. Class IV Milk is $13.80 for January and extends from $14.20 to $16.69 per cwt. for the rest of the year.

Just today March corn lost 22 cents and beans lost 48 cents per bushel, so a lot of trailing stop loss orders were executed. One guy told me he had so many notifications from triggered orders that his phone was starting to smell hot. 

Hay at Dyersville, Iowa, was reported as up $20 to $30 per ton from last week, with large squares topping at $230. At Premiere in Withee, Wisconsin, top Holstein cows were reported at $1650 to $2450 and Jersey cow tops ranged from $1700 to $2600 on a dispersal.

Livestock exhibition has been a sideline here for over 100 years with dairy cattle, Hampshire hogs and English Mastiffs. Show dog people are rather an artsy, temperamental bunch, and some are ill-informed. One internationally renowned Mastiff breeder explained at length how his Mastiffs were allowed to swim daily, thus improving their hips and decreasing the incidence of hip dysplasia in their offspring, as well.

Now this was a long time ago in Waco, Texas, nearly a decade before Janet Reno, but almost two centuries after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. So I didn’t tell him that his understanding of genetic inheritance couldn’t survive review by a committee of Iowa State University freshmen farm kids, or even a panel of State FFA Officers who weren’t farm kids. English Mastiffs, I should mention, are a wonderful breed. I’d love to get another one, but my wife won’t let me.

I recently started looking into getting a steer, heifer or whatever these beef people show, in order to have something out on a recreational show campaign. I asked a leading beef professional what it takes and what it costs to do some winning in the beef ring. For steers, it’s a lot of money and long hair. For heifers, it’s a lot of money, a falsified birth date and weekly filling with certain ratio of beer and water. It also takes exemplary management and talent, just as is the case with dairy cattle, show pigs or dogs. So I’m going to allow the monogramed show stick and big belt buckle idea to ferment for another year. Or maybe till early summer, at least.

Anyway, the beef show conversation prompted me to rethink the merits of having any ethics code for open dairy cattle shows. There could be, and I’ve advocated this Modest Proposal before, major open shows staged that have no rules and no standards. As such, I could enter and show literally anything in, for instance, the Jersey Spring Yearling Class – maybe a Jersey Fall Yearling or a composite of some kind, painted black such that the judge gets to decide where to place it based on his or her professional opinion and standards on type, AND authenticity of breed and age.

A few shows are already trending this way, particularly when breed associations aren’t a component of governance. And even when they are, enforcing anything isn’t free and can cause a breed or fair organization to lose their liability coverage. This might be a good place to mention that I know it’s fashionable for some to look down on the North American in Louisville, but when the state is behind ethics enforcement, it changes the dynamic entirely.

In the coming weeks, I will casually mention pure breeding, udder filling, body body filling and various quid pro quo activities for the show season and the subsequent competitions for All-American.