-XBAR- said:
Zero chance he was a 4 1/2 frame if he indeed weighed 2400. Though take into consideration the embellishments that typically follow this particular storyteller.
And $6000, in 1969, Mercy. I was curious so had to look it up: the average annual income in both Canada and the US in ‘69 was between $5,800 and $6,000. With the average price of Saskatchewan farmland at the time being $60 an acre, where would a Western Canadian farmer have acquired that kind of disposable income to drop 100 times that on a bull ?
Ryan, I really don't care if you believe what I say or not. Despite what you think, there was some pretty good prices paid back in this era for breeding stock. I have spent my entire life in this business and I do remember a few things yet. So I plead guilty to being a bit of a storyteller, even if I don't consider myself to be one. Actually, I feel very fortunate to have been able to do the only thing I ever wanted to do( and contrary to what you think, I did have to buy my farm and I paid dearly for it). I have been able to make my living from raising cattle and have never actually had another job ( other than helping others at a few sales over the years)
I remember my parents going to the Louada sale in Ontario in 1965 and they bought a son of Bapton Constructor at $5000. Another Saskatchewan breeder also went to this sale and he bought a bull at $12,500. He also bought 3 females between $2800 and $8000. The high selling bull in this sale was $30,000, and sold to Argentina. The high selling Shorthorn bull at the 1968 Regina Bull Sale was $8000. I still have marked catalogs for almost all of the Regina Bull Sales from the early 50s through to when the sale ended just a few years ago. For many years this was the biggest bull sale in the world, and they sold bulls for 5 days from morning to night. I remember there was over 1000 Polled Hereford bulls there one year in the 70s, and there was 14 bulls that sold at $10,000 or more.I think the high price that year was $45,000 and very few bulls passed in the sale. In 1976, Crestdale Super Flag 14G sold in the Shorthorn sale at Regina Bull Sale for $41,500. And just like now, many breeders would place a higher price on an animal when someone was interested in it, and they did not want to sell it too bad. This was probably the case, when we asked for a price for Red Max Prince. He priced him and my dad decided he didn't want to pay that much for him. I don't think that is such a strange thing to happen. When I look back at some of the prices back 40-50 years ago ( or more) I really don't think prices for breeding stock have kept up with how costs have increased. Even in the 1990s when we also had a Charolais herd, we sold them privately out of the yard at your pick at $3000. We sold 12-15 Charolais bulls for several years at this price. When I think of how much our costs have risen in the last 20 years, we are not keeping up with the prices we get for breeding stock today. For several years, we sold our Charolais bulls at $3000 and did not drop our price for the last few to sell. According to a inflation conversion table, $3000 in 1990 would be $5736 in 2019 dollars. We oftentimes sold 2-3 bulls at this price to some ranchers, and I remember one Montana rancher coming and taking 6 bulls at $3000 one year. Most of us don't think of this and still think $3000 is a good price today. My dad is 94 now, and still tries to keep up with what is happening in the cattle business. He attended our bull sale in March, and we averaged $4222 on the bulls. After the winter we had, I was pleased that we were able to sell them and was pleased with the sale average, My dad came to me after the sale was over, and said that compared to what we used to get, we were not keeping up with what our costs were. At first, I was a but upset that he was putting a damper on what I considered to be a good sale, but after thinking about this for awhile, I thought that he was probably closer to right than he was wrong. You can scratch your head on lots of things today, when you consider the price of grain, price of land, price of fertilizer and spray, and price of machinery. I don't understand this either. My neighbor just bought a new JD tractor on tracks and the largest air seeder they make ( I heard it was 76 feet wide). The cost of these two pieces of machinery was $1.7 million ( Canadian dollars) Another neighbor told me the interest alone on this purchase was $500 per day. He said that the guy who bought this machinery had told him this. Now how does anyone figure this makes any sense at any price you want to put on grain crops?
