14/04/2023
Food for thought! (No pun intended)
As I ponder boer whether pricing and why people so often seem taken aback at our finished whether prices (which is a huge reason I rarely even offer finished whethers) I did some quick math.
Most whethers are processed between 9-11 months. For the sake of math I went with 10.
We creep feed our kids from day 2-3 depending on the weather.
I skipped the first 8 weeks of life when crunching these numbers so they are likely hundreds of dollars short, but I did this for argument sake and for those who don’t creep feed their kids.
Let’s say on average these whethers eat 3lbs of grain and 1/2 flake of hay per feeding (that’s our min standard practice here for non show whethers)
That’s 6lbs of complete feed and 1 flake of her per day (per animal)
That’s 240 days (again, math was 8-30day months so this # is short)
That’s 1440lbs of grain or 28.8 (29) 50lb sacks of feed
@$25/bag, that’s $725.00 just in grain!
If you add in hay that’s approx 12 bales (again, this is if you get 20 flakes per bale- rare these days)
@$30/bale, that’s another $360.00!!
We are now up to $1085.00. This doesn’t include the cost to feed the dam while bred, breeding fee or buck costs, feeding dam and kid for the first 8 weeks or any associated medicines or veterinary care.
This also doesn’t include the slaughter fee ($90/goat + $85 to deliver to butcher)
This is just bare minimum rounding low numbers to raise a weaned kid to butcher age.
This is also translated over to our dairy breed animals as well, obviously we aren’t using these guys as meat animals, but the cost of raising livestock has gone through the roof!
Now that I’ve sat down and crunched the numbers, I’ve realized that we have actually lost money on every wether we sold that was ready for processing in 2022.
This is why, as a rule, we do not sell whethers unless they are weanlings 🙂 or unless I would really like to stop feeding them and our freezers are full 😂😂
Please consider this info the next time you have sticker shock at the current cost of livestock:)
