A local farmer in my area raises pastured chickens,
and goes to farmers markets, just to hand out fliers. He reports that
he always sells out. People marketing beef, lamb, pork and turkeys
also report the same findings. People are tired of eating chemicals,
hormones and garbage in their food. Even if you aren't organic
certified, you can get people to buy your beef from you. Either
already processed, or on the hoof. Your profit range is going to look
more like $800 - $1200 for dairy beef on the hoof at a peak auction
price. (That is providing a $10 per week grain budget, but assumes a
free pasture/hay budget. This would change if you had to buy hay) As
a pasture raised animal, you can get as much as twice that in some
areas, and just load it up and take it to the processor for your
customer. That is an over all profit possibility of $3900 or more per
beef, but you will have to market your product. Your 8 calves can
earn as much as $31,000 if you can take the time to market them and
deliver them to the processor for your customer.
But, we should at least look at the idea of selling the cuts
ourselves, since we've gone this far. Researching I found pasture
raised rib eye steaks were being sold for as much as $34 a POUND! I
do not need to show you the dollars, that are flying into the pockets
of other producers. Obviously there are costs, locally it costs $.89
per pound to process a beef, so you can cut $1200 or so off your
profit. But with prices for ground beef yielding $7 a pound, I don't
need to tell you it bears looking into. You will have to store the
beef in a deep freeze and be prepared to pay for the power to run it,
and maintenance on it, and the building it is in. One dairy beef
should give you from 500 to 700 pounds of meat, ranging in cuts, that
are priced from $7 a pound up to $34 a pound. Even at a rather modest
$10 per pound, you just upped your profits to $ 7000 per calf, minus
$600 for feed/care, and also another $1000 for processing. So, you
could get $5400 per calf. You can take another $1000 off for running
a freezer for a full year. So we have $4400 left, at the modest
prices I found pasture beef being sold for in my local area. $4400
per calf that we started out on goats milk. So, at the end of our
growth season, you could have an profit potential of $35,000 on your
original 8 calves.
Of course this is somewhat of an ideological presentation, there are
hidden costs, and more overhead that I am probably missing. There are
no vet bills factored and probably expenses missing. But there is
definitely a market, and it bears looking at. Really you can't tell
what it's going to cost, until you look at your local markets and
prices. Corn here is about $14 a hundred, it could be more, or less
elsewhere. The prices and speculations here are based on a middle
range of prices and profits for all of these ventures.
Bottle calves can give you a great profit margin,
especially if you consider raising them with alternative/less
expensive methods. You can easily raise some pasture if you have
land, and provided you have a tractor, you can rent a no disk planter
and plant winter rye or wheat to feed your calves on over the winter.
You can market your beef as weaned calves, pastured veal, feeder
calves, finished steers, or steaks already packaged up and ready for
the grill. The options are vast, and dairy calves are easy and cheap
to buy. In some areas, farmers are literally giving them away, I
found them online for as little as $10 a calf! There is a great
chance that you could find a local dairy, and buy a few calves, raise
them up and try some of these ideas and make a good profit. Until you
look at your own area's prices there is no way to really know the
profit potential. One thing is for sure, dairy beef is an intriguing
and growing business, and I think we will see a lot more of it at the
local market.
