A subject for another thread

[Rob R]

OK, just to recap, basically my suggestion is a case of 'see a cheap cow, buy it and sell on' [to the appropriate market, at an appropriate price]. If you don't see it, don't buy it, and don't worry about it, you've done all you can. Meanwhile your suggestion, from what I can gather, is to express 'concern' and urge other people to do what you aren't prepared to do, is that right?

In terms of practicality I can't see how my suggestion is a problem. It might not remove every single underpriced animal from the market, but it'll go an awful lot further than doing nothing about it.

[Jac]

from what I can gather, is to express 'concern' and urge other people to do what you aren't prepared to do, is that right?

Just exactly what am I not prepared to do?

I am not flooding the market with Dexters.
I breed for my own use.
I do not have a large number of breeding cows - quality not quantity.
I offer stock for sale infrequently and am quite prepared to kill it male or female if I do not get the price I want.
If there is something that I wouldn't keep here then I kill it, why should I expect someone to buy something that I wouldn't give house room to?
If someone approaches me and wants to purchase something esp. if they are new to the breed I warn them of all the pitfalls I do not put on a rosy picture because I am desperate to sell my stock.
I positively try to deter people who just want to breed them for no purpose.
I am very choosy who I sell to, not everyone who contacts me will be permitted to take one of my animals home with them.
I do not 'give' my Dexters away at less than the meat value.
Oh and let me not forget the 5 years I was area group secretary with all that that entailed.

On the whole, I think I have done more than my fair share for the breed and will continue to do so.

[Rob R]

Well, it sounds like we're both on the same page - I do all of those things, with the exception of being group secretary for five years, yet still the problem persists despite our best combined efforts. That suggests that something more has to be done to address the problem effectively. Although you perceive it to be a bigger problem than I do, but then you also perceive the solution to be easier (what I mean is that you see a bigger profit in these animals than I do, having declared £1000 to be the meat value). We both know that the people producing them aren't going to stop by being asked nicely, so there will always be a steady supply that needs addressing.

I have bought more than one animal at less than £1000 and put them in my herd, thus taking them off the market and stopping the price of these animals slipping down even further. By your reckoning I should have paid more for quality animals, but then my £1000 would only have bought a single animal and there'd still be the remaining animal on the open market. Therefore I see my efforts this way to be more effective than either paying more for individuals or not buying at all.

I haven't bought every animal though, partly down to a lack of money and partly down to them not having the right qualities to join my herd. So, that leaves a lot of animals for you to buy up and sell on in the same way that you advocate that the breeders of these animals should be doing, and because you see a return in them it might even make your husband feel better about the profitability of smallholding. There are cows going for £200/250, if you can turn them out at £1000 that could be up to a £750 profit on each one.

[Jac]

Your going to have to give me some time on this one. I'm up to my eyes in it trying to get my orders ready for collection.

[Rob R]

Take as long as you like - we've got plenty of hay to make and cows to move here.

[Rob R]

Yes Rob maybe feisty was a bit unkind to our dear dexters but whenever I change the around who are in the group they don't rest until every member has had a good wrestle with every other member just to make sure pecking order is correct, my dairy herd was never anything like that thorough! I shall re phrase and go for more intelligent than your average bovine and playful!!!

We have a cow, 34, who must be fairly high in the pecking order; tonight, as we were watching them grazing, one of the lower pecking cow started to drink. 34 came, from the middle of the paddock, pushed the subordinate off the trough before she'd barely had time to drink, then turned straight back round to go back to grazing in the middle of the field again...

[Jac]

There are cows going for £200/250, if you can turn them out at £1000 that could be up to a £750 profit on each one.

No, we are talking about the meat value of animals with good conformation that are adequately finished. However, I didn't go into Dexters to become a butcher.

[Rob R]

There are cows going for £200/250, if you can turn them out at £1000 that could be up to a £750 profit on each one.

No, we are talking about the meat value of animals with good conformation that are adequately finished. However, I didn't go into Dexters to become a butcher.

Therein lies your problem, cheap prices for the animals that don't fall into that category or not actually cheap - they're the right price for what they are. Both you and Mark have said that quality shows through and continues to attract the higher prices, so where is the issue here -low prices for low 'quality' animals seems to be correct, so why should we be concerned about this?

Most other breeders didn't go into Dexters to be butchers either, but the only way to really make them pay is to become one, at least part time. If you've just got a few animals it's cheaper to accept a loss and just sell them on the hoof than it is to invest yet more time and money in setting yourself up as a butcher.

As we can see from your experience, even if they do invest in the time, skills and infrastructure to butcher their own, and ask more money for quality breeding stock sales, that still doesn't necessarily translate into profit. I don't know whether you do factor in return on investment or the cost of borrowing into your calculations but for many breeders the extra costs aren't worth it just to break even.

I did an online calculator of what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation thought I should be earning (http://www.minimumincome.org.uk) yesterday and we worked out that to match that from Dexters alone we'd need to increase the herd four-fold, which would be another 120 breeding cows, or £120k at your prices, £60k at mine. Of course it may be that your £1000 cows would yield twice as much beef over their lifetime and therefore we'd need to only buy 60 extra cows for the same money, but they do have to yield the extra £60k on the same inputs, or they're not worth it.

It might be that you are actually better off getting better value out of £500 cows by investing some of the extra money into better feeding and management, hard to say as we haven't really touched upon the actual returns in this thread. It may be that to get £1000 cows you have to make that extra investment anyway, which is another added cost that has to come out of your meat value. I could buy a £1000 cow and she might do better on what is available, but equally if she's been reared on modern grasses and/or concentrates she might not be able to cope on marsh grasses and lose condition and production, that's a big risk to take with an extra 100% capital on top.

[Jac]

Therein lies your problem, cheap prices for the animals that don't fall into that category or not actually cheap - they're the right price for what they are. Both you and Mark have said that quality shows through and continues to attract the higher prices, so where is the issue here -low prices for low 'quality' animals seems to be correct, so why should we be concerned about this?

Let us put a different twist on this. Suppose even more people start doing Dexter beef. As they are giving their stock away anyway they can make a little more beefing them. They don't need to go to the trouble of an on farm butchery they can just bring it home in a bag from the abattoir and sell it for - 50% of what you are. Don't say I have competition from butchers and supermarkets Dexter beef is in a league of its own. Now it doesn't matter how 'grass fed' or 'environmentally friendly' your beef is under these circumstances, it does set the precedence of the price. What are you going to do then - buy in even cheaper cows, where does it stop?

This is the issue with the Dexter. You cannot dictate what people ask for their stock - good, bad or indifferent. The commercial industry appreciate it and the price the farmer gets for his stock must support the whole industry or it collapses. I have had good experience with Lleyn sheep - good return even at my costs. If new Dexter owners were asked to pay the actual costs of production for a quality animal then they wouldn't be so keen to give it away they would buy and breed unregistered stock.

[Rob R]

Therein lies your problem, cheap prices for the animals that don't fall into that category or not actually cheap - they're the right price for what they are. Both you and Mark have said that quality shows through and continues to attract the higher prices, so where is the issue here -low prices for low 'quality' animals seems to be correct, so why should we be concerned about this?

Let us put a different twist on this. Suppose even more people start doing Dexter beef. As they are giving their stock away anyway they can make a little more beefing them. They don't need to go to the trouble of an on farm butchery they can just bring it home in a bag from the abattoir and sell it for - 50% of what you are. Don't say I have competition from butchers and supermarkets Dexter beef is in a league of its own. Now it doesn't matter how 'grass fed' or 'environmentally friendly' your beef is under these circumstances, it does set the precedence of the price. What are you going to do then - buy in even cheaper cows, where does it stop?

Lets just stop there for a second. I have to operate my business in the real world situation, I'm not relying upon 'cheap cows' to make it work, but equally I'd be at a competitive disadvantage if I were paying above the odds for cows that suit someone elses system better than they suit my own.

If I go to an auction the cows I want are more expensive than the average, because my contribution makes them that way but when I've reached the end of my budget I have to stop bidding because I wouldn't have the means to pay for them otherwise. If I only bid on one cow and run it up to £1000 that's my budget gone on one animal, or I could spread that budget across several animals and help raise the average by bidding on others too.

If I buy privately the same thing applies, I only have a limited budget. I thought you were going to tell me how the economics work for a higher priced cow and how she produce x% more and how that covers her costs over x years. I can't argue with the figures. Even so you have made no attempt to explain how we address supply and demand. If I pay more for one cow, that's great, but automatically I'd be paying less (or nothing) for other cows. Great for the person with one cow to sell, less great for the rest.

As far as the price of beef goes, like you have said about quality of livestock, it shines through, and I know that there are people out there now flogging it out of the boot of their car to mates down the pub (there are also many people producing 'grassfed' just because it's seen a blade of grass in it's lifetime). If you spend all your efforts worrying about those people being competition then you're not going to get very far, because they have a different target market. Such people provide a different product and service to what I am producing with no guarantees or long term commitments. It's possible to have more confidence in the product I produce, both from a customers & my own perspective.

Lets put a further twist on the scenario - if you didn't have people out there producing inferior beef (or breeding animals) then you'd have no bad examples to compare it to - what you're doing would become the norm & would not stand out from the crowd.

[Jac]

Lets just stop there for a second. I have to operate my business in the real world situation, I'm not relying upon 'cheap cows' to make it work

But you would have to if everyone around you started to sell the beef for less than you could currently produce it for.

[Jac]

If you spend all your efforts worrying about those people being competition then you're not going to get very far, because they have a different target market. Such people provide a different product and service to what I am producing with no guarantees or long term commitments. It's possible to have more confidence in the product I produce, both from a customers & my own perspective.

This also applies to some Dexter breeders but it does beg the question should registration mean something other than proof of parentage?

[Rob R]

Lets just stop there for a second. I have to operate my business in the real world situation, I'm not relying upon 'cheap cows' to make it work

But you would have to if everyone around you started to sell the beef for less than you could produce it for.

Are you conceding the point on it being a false economy to pay less for cows now?

[Jac]

Even so you have made no attempt to explain how we address supply and demand.

But neither have you other than tell breeders to buy them back but is it just going to lead to even more being bred when the person selling them has reduced their stock and has more grass to start churning them out again?

[Rob R]

Even so you have made no attempt to explain how we address supply and demand.

But neither have you other than tell breeders to buy them back but is it just going to lead to even more being bred when the person selling them has reduced their stock and has more grass to start churning them out again?

Well that's because I don't see that it is a significant problem, you do. I suggested one very simple solution. Not sure what more you expect of me.