Under the Wire

Why can’t everything go right at the same time just once? This cattle business gets kind of frustrating sometimes.

Here we are with the best cattle prices for quite awhile. Good old supply and demand seems to be in our favor. Grain is a little cheaper these days so feeders could justify higher cattle with less expensive gains. Just as it looked like we had it made, we hit a snag.

Drought around the country has kind of knocked the props out from under the cattle business momentarily. The fear of short feed supplies sends ripples through our cattle markets.

Packers and commodity traders have used our insecurities to convince us the world is coming to an end. Newspapers print front page stories about the dry weather. It’s on all our minds. The fear of short feed supplies sends ripples through our cattle markets.

I’m not going to try to convince you this isn’t a problem. It’s dry over a lot of the country. What we forget, however, is that it’s always dry somewhere. Subtract those areas where it is not dry this year, or last, plus those areas where it’s never any other way but dry, and things aren’t so bad.

I haven’t done a survey of the whole country so I have no revealing figures to quote, but I remember drought as always being around somewhere.

At one place I lived years ago, an old timer once asked me “Son, do you remember Noah and the 40 days and 40 night rain?”

“Of course,” I remarked.

“Well,” he drawled, “here we got a quarter inch!” I’ve been in areas that were so dry the jack rabbits carried canteens and lizards wore sunscreen. A rancher once told me about a friend of his from Texas who came to visit. The rancher took him for a tour of the region. The Texan’s eyes widened in amazement and awe. “Why, you’ve got cattle, grass and water and they’re all in the same pasture!” he exclaimed.

My point is, people become accustomed to some situations such as drought and learn to tolerate it. Others of us can’t seem to get used to dry weather, or wet weather, too, for that matter. We survive and adapt to whatever comes along, no matter how serious. That’s the wonder of the human spirit.

It could rain tomorrow and all this would be forgotten. A little mud on our boots would change everybody’s outlook.

Besides, if things like drought didn’t come along once in a while, then everybody would want to be in our line of work. This at least keeps the fainthearted out. An inscription referring to early pioneer wagon trains venturing west summed up our outlook, “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way.”

By the way, I had to write this very quickly because a rain can blow in just about any time and turn our dust into mud. At least that is what we keep hoping for!