Ranching Is a Lot Like Playing the Stock Market: Pregnancy Checking at West Ranch

If there is one thing I’ve learned about ranching, it’s that raising cattle is a lot like playing the stock market. You’re constantly watching trends, evaluating your investments, weighing risks, and making decisions that could either pay off or cost you tremendously down the road.

The difference? Our investments are living, breathing animals, and Mother Nature has a pretty significant say in how things turn out.

This fall at West Ranch, we’ve been making some particularly difficult decisions, and I thought I’d take you behind the scenes of something that happens every year on our ranch: pregnancy checking.

First, Let’s Talk About How a Cow-Calf Operation Works

Throughout the summer, our bulls are turned out with our cows for breeding season. At this point, our mama cows are still nursing the calves they gave birth to earlier in the year, while hopefully becoming pregnant with next year’s calf.

It’s a continuous cycle.

Once fall rolls around, those calves are weaned and shipped, and almost immediately, we shift our attention to the next generation.

Are our cows pregnant? Which ones will produce a calf next spring? And perhaps most importantly, which ones can we afford to keep through the winter?

To understand why those questions matter so much, you first have to understand how the cattle industry works.

There are many different segments of the beef industry. Some operations raise calves, others purchase those calves and grow them, and still others finish cattle before processing.

Think of it like the wine industry. Some wineries grow their own grapes, process them, and produce the finished bottle of wine. Others simply grow grapes and sell them to another business that handles the rest.

Cattle ranching works much the same way.

At West Ranch, our primary operation is what we call a cow-calf operation. We maintain our breeding herd, raise calves, and sell those calves after weaning. We don’t typically grow and finish those cattle ourselves.

West Cattle Company, our direct-to-consumer beef business, is a little different. Those cattle stay with us from birth all the way through finishing. We oversee the entire process, from our carefully selected genetics to the beef that eventually reaches your freezer.

But for our larger cow-calf operation, our income depends on one very important thing: producing calves.

And that’s where pregnancy checking comes in.

Bred or Open: The Big Fall Sort

Every fall, we work through our cows and replacement heifers to determine which animals are pregnant.

In ranching terms, we call them bred or open.

Bred means they’re carrying a calf. Open means they’re not pregnant.

It sounds simple enough, right?

But here’s where the stock market analogy really comes into play.

Every cow on our ranch is an investment. She requires grass, water, minerals, and sometimes supplemental feed to make it through the year. If she’s bred, we anticipate she’ll produce a calf next spring, providing a return on that investment.

If she’s open, we’re looking at feeding and maintaining an animal for another entire year without receiving a calf in return.

Now, that doesn’t automatically mean an open cow gets sold.

Sometimes it makes financial sense to hold on to a younger animal, especially one with good genetics and plenty of productive years ahead of her. Certain ages and stages of reproduction can be particularly challenging, and a young cow that doesn’t breed back one year may still be a valuable part of your herd in the future.

You can choose to hold that investment and hope for a better return next year.

Or you can sell.

And sometimes, you can sell one investment and purchase another.

It’s a constant balancing act between what you have, what you need, and what you can afford.

Then Mother Nature Throws You a Curveball

This year has been an especially difficult one for ranchers in our part of Wyoming.

We have had virtually no moisture. Our pastures are incredibly dry, and in many places, the grass is simply gone.

When people think about drought, they often picture brown pastures and empty stock tanks. But drought affects so much more than what you can see.

It affects reproduction.

Our cattle rely on native grasses and forbs to provide the nutrition they need. During a normal growing season, those plants offer a variety of nutrients that help keep our cattle healthy and support successful breeding.

We supplement with minerals to help fill nutritional gaps, but those supplements are intended to work alongside the natural forage our cattle are grazing. They can’t magically replace an entire growing season of missing nutrients.

When the rain doesn’t come, the plants don’t grow as they should, and the nutritional quality and availability of forage suffer.

And when cows aren’t receiving adequate nutrition, their ability to breed back can suffer too.

That was certainly a challenge across our region this year.

The Decision We Didn’t Really Get to Make

At West Ranch, we have a pasture called Long Meadow that we absolutely love using during breeding season.

It has trees for shade, good access to water, and typically plenty of grass. It’s a wonderful place for our cows and bulls to spend the summer. The cattle can get out of the heat, stay comfortable, and focus on doing what we need them to do: breed.

But this year, Long Meadow ran out of grass and water.

We were faced with a decision.

We could leave the cattle there and try to supplement them with hay we simply didn’t have available in the quantities needed, or we could move them to another pasture that still had grass.

So we moved them.

And while that was absolutely the right decision for the health and well-being of our cattle, it came with consequences.

The new pasture didn’t offer the same ideal breeding conditions. The bulls were dealing with the heat, they weren’t as active, and our breeding percentages suffered.

It’s frustrating because we knew moving them could affect our breed-up rates.

But what choice did we have?

You can’t leave cattle in a pasture without adequate feed and water just because it’s the best place for breeding.

These are the decisions ranchers make every single day. Sometimes there isn’t a perfect option. Sometimes you’re simply choosing the best of two difficult outcomes.

And sometimes you don’t see the full financial impact of that decision until months later.

When Hay Costs $400 a Ton, Everything Changes

Fast-forward to fall pregnancy checking.

We now have a group of bred cows and a group of opens. In a normal year, we might consider holding onto some of those younger open cows and giving them another opportunity to breed next summer.

But this isn’t a normal year.

Our pastures are depleted. We don’t have the grass reserves we’d typically rely on, and hay is running around $400 a ton.

Every animal we keep through the winter represents a significant expense.

So this year, keeping open cows simply didn’t make financial sense for our operation.

We made the difficult decision to sell them.

And here’s where things get interesting.

Selling, Buying, and Reinvesting

Remember that stock market comparison?

Just because we sold open cows doesn’t necessarily mean we’re walking away from those investments entirely.

Instead, we can take the money from selling open cattle and reinvest it in animals that are already bred.

For example, depending on market prices, selling two open cows might allow us to purchase one bred cow or bred heifer.

Now we’ve traded two animals that wouldn’t produce a calf next spring for one that is expected to.

We’re feeding fewer animals, using fewer resources, and positioning ourselves to hopefully have a calf to sell next year.

Of course, that decision comes with its own risks. Purchased cattle are a significant investment, and there’s always uncertainty involved.

But that’s ranching.

Do you hold your younger cows and hope they breed next year? Do you sell them while the market is strong? Do you reinvest in bred heifers? Do you purchase mature bred cows? Or do you reduce your herd and wait for conditions to improve?

There isn’t one right answer.

Every ranch has different resources, different genetics, different financial obligations, and different long-term goals.

And every one of those factors plays into the decisions we make.

The Reality of Today’s Cattle Market

One of the most challenging parts of ranching right now is the cost of getting into, or back into, the cattle business.

Cattle prices are incredibly high.

For consumers, that shows up in the price of beef at the grocery store. But for ranchers, it also means the cost of purchasing replacement animals has increased dramatically.

If we were to sell our entire breeding herd today and decide a few years from now that we wanted to start over, we wouldn’t be talking about a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars.

We would be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild that herd.

That’s what makes these decisions so consequential.

Selling cattle might help you survive a drought today, but rebuilding your herd tomorrow could be financially overwhelming.

And yet, keeping more cattle than your land can support can be equally devastating.

It’s a delicate balance, and one that requires constantly looking ahead.

More Than Just Cows in a Pasture

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about ranching is that we simply turn cattle out to pasture, let them graze, and collect a check when it’s time to sell.

I wish it were that simple!

The reality is that we’re constantly evaluating markets, weather patterns, feed costs, genetics, breeding performance, and the long-term sustainability of our operation.

And unlike the stock market, where you can make an investment decision from behind a computer screen, our decisions involve animals that depend on us every single day.

We can’t control the rain. We can’t control the price of hay. We can’t control what the cattle market will do six months from now.

But we can make the most informed decisions possible with the resources we have.

This fall, that meant selling more open cows than we might have in another year and strategically purchasing bred cattle to help maintain our future calf crop.

Was it exactly how we hoped the summer would turn out? Absolutely not.

But that’s the nature of agriculture.

Every year brings a different set of challenges, and every year we adjust.

So the next time you drive past a pasture full of cows, remember there’s a whole lot more happening behind that fence than meets the eye.

There’s an entire business built on investments, calculated risks, hard decisions, and a whole lot of faith that next year will bring a little more rain.

And if there’s one thing every rancher knows, it’s that you can make all the right decisions and still be at the mercy of Mother Nature.

From our ranch to your table,

Brittany