Let's talk cow-calf.  I came across an article recently wherein the distinguished author was waxing oratorial on the forecasts for the next decade and how to pencil heifers purchased today over the coming decade.  After I stopped pounding my head on my desk (due to sheer exhaustion) I starting thinking earnestly about the next decade.  Here are some thoughts I have on the possibilities to come in the next decade.  I hope that these thoughts make you understand how utterly wrong-headed forecasting is and how essential the need is for a responsive, dynamic, real-time ability to capture the copious profit available in the breeding stock markets.

Ann's list of things that could possibly happen in the next decade.  Please be sure to pencil these into your bred heifer purchase calculations. (snort) :

1.  A complete collapse of the US dollar

2.  Widespread bank runs

3.  Hyperinflation

4.  Nuclear attack on one or more major cities

5.  Mass dislocation of urban people into rural areas

6.  Martial Law

7.  Constitutional crisis

8.  Dissolution of Federal Government

9.  Famine

10.  Hot war in the homeland

Certitudes?  No.  Possibilities?  Yes.  Every single one. 

Now, tell me again about how you are going to get 8 calf crops out of the heifer, at which time you will receive $0.60 per pound slaughter value for her?  Um hm.  Right.  And show me the chart of your projected cash flow through 2017?  Riiiigght.  I wonder if guys running cattle in the Lower Saxony region of Germany in 1937 did 10-year economic projections on their cowherds.  Hmmm.  In retrospect, that would have looked rather silly, eh?  But I digress.  What in the world does that have to do with us?  Only everything.

Stop.  Think.  These times are definitely extreme, but they contain a universal lesson.  You can NOT forecast what is going to happen 10 minutes from now, much less 10 YEARS from now.  The only way to be consistently profitable with a cowherd is to live in the present and assume that EVERY ANIMAL is liquid every year.  By doing this, a cow-calf operator can be profitable each and every year.  As soon as a person starts granting breeding animals decade-long "profitability trials", then all bets are off and profitability will be a hit-and-miss prospect, at best. 

Forecasters are killing the North American Cattle Industry.
"Global warming" is a complete fraud designed to advance the cause of socialism and enslave humanity.
Abortion is the murder of an innocent human being and is never justified under any circumstance whatsoever.
Every human being is a question, to which the ONLY answer is Jesus Christ.