I recorded the following entry while en route to my camping spot for the evening. Edited lightly for readability, coherence and, in the case of references to "Mother", content. I had a lot of riding to do, and I wasn't excited by it.
Alright, um, holy mother (mounts bike).
I'm on my way to Falcon State Park right now--'bout thirty miles away--and I think that I have about an hour and a half of light.
This is going to be a busta-BUST. Yeegh.
(sees a group of men in front a store to the right and waves) Hellooooo.
RY's Livestock Sale. You have Sam, you have sellers, you have buyers, you have the brand inspector, you have office people, you have restaurant people, and then you have the people who work out in the pens.
One guy in the pens said that...
(sees a road sign) 13 miles. Falcon State Park 28 miles. So, 41. Let's hope for no hills.
One guy in the pens said that you have to be careful because when they're coming back from the actual auction...
I'll explain to you how the auction is set up. There are two main structures. The first is the auction house, and the second is three sets of cattle pens under a big metal roof. You have one set of pens on the left, one set of pens on the right and one set of pens in the middle. All the pens in the left are cattle yet to be sold. Everything in the middle and over is already sold. This is all in the back.
In the front is the acutal closed building part of it, and they have this sort of show ring. It's a semi-circle, and in the middle sits the auctioneer. Behind him sit the bookeepers. They match the cattle with its buyer once the auctioneer has, of course, auctioned it off. To the periphery of the inner circle are people are people prodding along the cattle. They have cattle prods, they have whips, they yell, they shout, they bang on gates.
So, head come in on one side of the circle, everybody bids, there's a buyer, someone documents it, and the head exits on the other side and makes an angry dash towards the pens to the middle and the left.
As that cattle are coming out, as I was saying, one worker said that you have to be really careful. If you're not paying attention all the time, they're going to run into you. Some workers have broken arms. Others have just gotten the shit trampled out of them. That happens.
Inside, the process is really interesting. An auctioneer spits out a constant, unintelligble drone. I don't even think that he says real words. Sort of like "Heeeey, bidabadayyyyy gdabadayyyyy gdaba dibbydibby mmmmmm dayyyyyy mmmmm gabadadayyyy mmmmm thirteen! gdabadayyyyy fifteen! gdabadibbbby dibby biddy twenty-three, twenty-three ay! D.J., D.J." Every once in a while a number squeaks out, and you can actually tell what the guy's saying. Somehow people manage to buy cattle.
Two things that I found sort of comical: first, talking with this one buyer. His name was Terry. Each of these cows sells at about a dollar twenty-five, a dollar twenty-four: anywhere as low as about a dollar ninety-four a pound to a buck fifty-four a pound. So there's swing, there's a range. But he bought a particular cow for really expensive--I think a dollar fifty-two a pound--and I asked him, "so why did you buy that cow for so much?" He looked at me and he laughed, and he said "I don't know." He ended up buying me a coffee later too, so I guess he had a couple bucks to spare.
The other thing was this other gentlemen whom I was watching throughout the auction--I didn't catch his name. At the end of it all, he and I started talking about the sale. Most of the cattle that he bought ran a dollar fourteen, give or take five. That was relatively cheap, I told him, in comparison to the other cattle--HOLY MOTHER(a mac truck careens by, too close for comfort). He looked at me dead in the eye and said "cheap my ass. Ain't nothing cheap when it comes to buying cattle." It's still expensive. It's still a business.
And the head guy, Sam Rodriguez--a nice guy, a businessman, very much a businessman. In a very humanistic way though, from what I gather.
His philosophy is make a profit for his sellers and a profit for himself. And he achieves that through--(a big semi whizzes past) MOTHER, I don't want to die... He achieves that through selling his cattle, by conducting his business. Local ranchers come in and they pay him a certain cover fee, as it were. Sam earns a percentage off of each head sold (traffic becomes increasingly busy)... and so, every Friday, he has this sale, and this Friday the sale was for about five hundred head. These are cattle ranging from barren heffers to heffers, from calves to bulls--you name it, he had it. And all these cattle come from local ranchers.
So, five hundred this week, and five hundred because this is hunting season. You don't have to eat cow when you can eat deer. Either which way, Sam still made a profit--what, he didn't share... (looks to the right, at a field) There's a whole lot of food out there... onions... onions... or melons, I think those are melons. Yeah, those are melons, or squash. It would make sense for the season, huh?
So he makes a certain profit off of each head of cattle (long pause with increasing traffic). Every Friday (more traffic).
The important thing to keep in mind is that RY Livestock is the only place in the region for sales. People come to Sam's place to buy their cattle and to sell their cattle. And this is a seller's market: what's good for sellers is what's good for Sam.
Sellers earn a higher profit off of their cattle because it's sold locally. Because it's sold locally, the cattle don't have to be transported across a great distance. This means that the local market don't suffer shrinkage, bruising, death loss or freight costs--all that stuff that other ranchers who, say, import their cattle from Mexico suffer.
There is a really interesting interplay between Mexican ranchers and American ranchers because Mexican ranchers don't allow United States cattle into Mexico because of mad cow disease. From what Sam told me, the cases of mad cow disease were the result of cattle imported from Canada, not the United States. At any rate, it doesn't make a difference to the Mexicans. Mexican ranchers still ship their cattle to the United States.
From what the brand inspector told me, a lot of these cattle are heftier (yuck, yuck)... are stronger, are more durable, because they have a Burma breed. A lot of the cattle have an Indian breed of cattle intermixed at a one-fourth proportion. Those cattle are allowed into the United States (long pause). A little tougher now: the wind's all over the place (pause). And many times it's not of the same grade. A lot of that cattle is converted into ground beef because it's not of the same quality.
And then, Sam's motto: "The willingness to put our customers first in whatever we do. This is what separates true customer satisfaction from just talk."
That's it for me. Mother.
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