Does anyone know what time of year livestock was shipped in the first half of the 20th century?
I recall having been told that entire herds of cattle were moved out of snow country before the first snowfall, and then back up to those mountain pastures once grass started growing in the Spring.
Not sure about cattle sold to packing plants for conversion to steaks and burgers.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Raising livestock is a brutal business requiring very good prognostic powers to maximize profits. Prices paid are by the pound, so having cattle at maximum weight increases income. However, the price paid fluctuates wildly depending on the supply of cattle. Rounding up cattle from open range and moving them are significant costs, as is feed for the winter.
If the price didn’t fluctuate with supply, the ideal time to ship to the slaughter houses would be September when the cattle need to come down from the high altitude ranges (I’m talking Colorado). You are rounding them up into stock trains anyway - just ship them to the slaughter house and reduce your winter feed costs.
But since other ranchers are facing the same issues, the first cattle to market command a higher price than when the supply peaks. So many would start shipping cattle to market in August, rather than waiting unitl September. August and September were certainly the peak stock hauling months for the D&RG(W), with much smaller peaks in May and June when the snow would melt off the high range.
Again, this information is for Colorado, where winter snow provides the relatively lush pasture on high altitude (8000 - 9000 ft and higher) lands when it melts. Yet there is substantial range at lower altitude (4000-5000 ft) where the summers are too dry to support large numbers of cattle, but tolerable temperatures and snowfalls in winter.
Fred W
When might it be for a railroad in northern Nevada?
The Spring roundup is referred to as the ‘calf-cut’ or, as they refer to it in the movies, branding. It is called the ‘calf cut’ because at this time the calves are ‘cut away’ from the she-stuff–that’s cows for you city fellers*.* At this time a cowman will decide just how he wants to divy up his ‘calf crop’ and a lot of them are shipped off to Midwestern feedlot operations.
The Fall roundup is referred to as the ‘beef-cut’, so called because at this time the cowman makes a decision as to what he is going to do with his pre-Winter herd and cuts the market cattle from the herd. This is the prime shipping time; a lot of yearlings go to feedlots at this time while most of the three and four year old steers–who should have attained a weight of 1500 to 1700 lbs by this time–are sent off to the market to eventually wind up as Sunday-after-church pot roast.
My boss ran a very small feedlot operation himself, 1100 to 1200 head. For some unknown reason in the summer of 1958 the price of beef suddenly spiked about thirteen cents a pound–no one ever figured that one out because there was a recession going on at that time. We cleaned out the feed lot and conducted a mid-summer ‘beef cut’ shipping another twelve or thirteen hundred head. With this much stock gone off the range this didn’t leave enough work to go around and, along with three other hands, I got laid off; I went back to Idaho Falls and enlisted in the Air Force where I stayed for the next twenty years. The novel I am not writing centers around ranching on the Northern Plains from 1907 until 1947.
I only worked stock on the Northern Plains so I can’t enlighten you as to how things might be different on the Southern ranges; in the north they were still heavily into train movement in 1958 although an increasing amount of stock was beginning to move by truck. The big stimulus for road movement came as a result of the Interstate Highw
Did Chicago suck in cattle all year round? …and did this stop being a rail business at some date?
Thanks
[8D]
All I know about Northern Nevada is from drives across the I-80 corridor and side trips when I was commuting between Colorado and California. Northern Nevada (and Southeastern Oregon) dries out very quickly as soon as you come out of the Tahoe basin and Truckee area. Snows aren’t nearly as heavy, either. So the amount of acres needed to support a steer goes up significantly. Western ranges use acres/steer rather than cows/acre of the East.
Impacts of the climate and land differences on the cattlemen’s cycle of culling and marketing would be just guesswork on my part. Locating and analyzing Southern Pacific stock car movements and records would provide better data. Also, the relative number of stock cars rostered on mostly captive road operations like the V&T, Lake Tahoe railway, and other Northern Nevada lines would provide evidence of the importance (or lack of importance) of cattle ranching in the area.
A nearby fellow (Tom Van Woermer) did an analysis on Colorado Midland records for the very early 20th Century and found a lot of interesting information. There was a lot more foreign road traffic than he had expected to see. And the sugar beet industry was of much greater importance at that time than later on in US history. The traffic pointed to significant sugar beet growing in Oregon as well as California.
just my thoughts
Fred W
The wiki article on the Chicago Union Stockyards does have some decent information (including that the yards closed in July 1971. This was because the meat processing industry had become decentralized over the decades from WWII, so that livestock was shipped (by truck) to a small local meat processing plant and rendered into meat and meat by-products, which then were shipped out by truck (or reefer) - while pieces of meat needed to be kept cold, they still took up less space and didn’t need to be exercised and watered like the livestock that originated them.
I think at least until the early 1990s there was a hog flow (HOGX) to Farmer John’s in California.
Wiki on Livestock haulage by rail
[tup][tup][tup] Brilliant Chutton [:D] Thankyou. [8D]