 Backgrounding cattle in 2010 is going to be a real challenge for us cattle producers across North Dakota The price of feeds are growing up tremendously and the price of cattle keep changing So it begins to wonder why would we ever even think about feeding calves beyond the normal weaning time? Well, if we do some budgeting we find out that the weaning time Profits that can be made after weaning for feeding that opportunities actually fairly good With the rapid changes that we have in our feeding product in our in the in the industry Our co-product prices are feed prices or discounted grains. Everything is fairly dynamic this year As well as the pricing of calves so consequently there is some margin to be made some profit made or it appears to be Doing this so One of the projects we have here is called calf web and it's an internet site that you can connect to It's a chaps2000.com Slash calf web or just type in the Google search for calf web and it'll come to our home page At our home page We have three two different options that you can look at one is the break-even calculator And the other one is the closeout analyzer pressing the break-even calculator And what you find then is a spreadsheet or not really a spreadsheet But a film the blank type form that you can put in your own numbers And at the end you've got three different options for the prices and then you can do a Basically an array of different prices see where the profitability could be for these cattle When we do this it's It's internet-based. It's quick. It's easy There's also links to other sites which should give market prices across North Dakota For feeder cattle. There's actually another site where you can look for prices for The feeder market in other words the CME futures market and with those you can go together and fill in the blank for these particular Spreadsheets, okay when you go into the spreadsheet one thing you have to do is put in your name put in your address put in the type of clavs you're going to feed and then their weight and Then put in the price that you're going to have for the calves Whether you're going to use your hot home price or another price the cell barn price Whatever price you want to put in and then we start filling out the blanks until we get to the bottom end There's options for feed costs there's an option for as Fed conversions now here's a thumb rule when you use ad-fed conversions eight pounds of feed per pound a gain Works for background and calves around two and three quarters pounds a day gain So eight pounds of feed for a pound a gain for two and a half to two and three quarters pounds of average daily gain That's as fed if you're using a high moisture feed something like that Then you're going to have to have a lot more as-fed feed to the feed bunk But when calculated out in a dry matter basis, it's pretty much the same Okay, now I've got to have charges for yardage and yardage in North Dakota somewhere between Anywhere from 25 to 32 cents We could have it at as low as maybe 10 cents if all you want to cover is your direct cost, but usually there's facility and pumping water and insurance and fuel and Machine re-repair and everything else that has to go in as well as labor So a lot of times the yardage is up towards 32 cents Per head per day, then there's a veterinary cost five to ten dollars per head. There's a marketing cost Put in your numbers two three percent of the ending value Trucking costs. There's a miscellaneous feed toss that can be five ten dollars. That's like ear tags or vaccinations There's also a price protection cost in case you want to buy some price protection And that can be anywhere from zero dollars per head up to 15 to 25 dollars per hit And then we include an interest rate and then we do have another item in there that allows for you to put in a certain amount of dollar value that you might have to Come up with to maintain ownership of these calves That could range from zero to a hundred percent depending on how you do your particular job So now when you're at the bottom now you have the opportunity to put in your prices And you're putting your prices on a per pound basis for selling these calves I like to use today Use an array of 95 cents a dollar and a dollar five for eight weight calves Click the calculate button and then you'll have a spreadsheet if there's some errors there That means you put some numbers in incorrectly and you have to go back and figure it out Just talk backwards work it print it out And now you'll have a sheet that you can take to anybody That's calculated correctly And if there's some profitability made in the assumptions that you've used for feeding these calves now when you're all said and done one things I like to have you look at is Three months from now when you're finished background on these calves Let's use the closeout analyzer and find out how well you did It's different than the break-even calculator. That's a projection the closeout analyzer is like taking a test after you've After you've done it So tells you how you really did you might find out you did a lot better than what you projected or it might be the other way Either way, we sure hope you have an opportunity to background some cattle in North Dakota and With the fluctuating markets. It's surprising this year appears to be one of those years where backgrounding cattle could have an opportunity