How Ag News Reaches Ranchers Across Montana, Wyoming & The Dakotas

Let's get into a little bit of the markets.

Kind of how's the market trend in Montana and up in the northern states, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota? What are y'all seeing? What are y'all seeing on numbers? What have the fires and the droughts done to y'all in the last couple of years? And what does that look like on those inventory? I mean, and how's that affecting different things?

yeah well i suppose from an overall market standpoint be similar to what you guys are seeing it's just fantastic almost as as good as it's ever been or pretty close to it so that's uh much appreciated especially right now where boy across i'd say 80 90 of our region we're battling drought right now and you know it's it's spotty some areas are are better than others but pretty much everybody is is feeling it and especially in wyoming i would say just drove literally across the state here over the weekend.

And boy, there are some really tough pockets.

And we've seen a lot of cattle sold already.

A lot of yearlings that would have gone to grass and sold later in the summer have already gone.

A bunch of pairs across the region.

More cow-cat pairs than I can remember selling in a season.

in my career here and then of course the dry cows where we're hitting that market pretty hard.

So sure are thankful that these prices are so good because it's gonna be a challenging year and especially when you couple that with what guys are gonna have to pay for feed this year to have the hay and forage to get through the year.

I talked to one guy in central Wyoming here, and he said they just stopped feeding hay on Sunday.

And that's just how bad it is.

And he said, usually we try not to feed any hay through the entire year.

So there's some real challenges.

And so when you figure our hay production is going to be down because it's dry, because we don't have the irrigation water.

And then what is it going to cost to ship that hay in this year with diesel where it is it's going to be a difficult year.

Sure, it'll be profitable, I think, with just the level of markets that we're talking here, but a lot of that money is going to be eaten up.

So it's kind of interesting as you talk to producers where you have so much optimism from the market, but gosh, on Friday, there's a lot of challenges, not to mention the overall market headaches and what are we going to do with New World Screwworm now and all the news headlines that affect it.

But It's an interesting place, but I do think this cattle market is outstanding.

Looks like it's got some staying power.

We'll see what the video sales do this summer, but they seem well positioned to potentially set some more records this year.