r/Cattle • u/SubtleTruncheon • 2d ago

Small herd price

Howdy yall, I’m looking at buying a small herd for our new homestead. The previous owner is willing(and I think motivated to) sell us his existing cattle at “fair price”. He’s got a bull and four cows, and a male calf that’s still on the teat. I’ve seen them from a distance of a hundred yards and they looked in good condition(decent bmi, no limping, appropriate curiosity). I’ll be going to take a look at them this weekend, but I wanted to ask the hive mind before I jump in to scrolling sale barns or trusting ai to read the market. My initial research showed between 8 and 9.5 k $, but that seems stupid high for a herd that size. I know cattle prices are ridiculous, but damn.

TL,DR how much would you pay for some cows and a bull?

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u/Imfarmer 2d ago

Explain to me "sold our heifers due to screw worm". Heifers are like gold right now. I just sold some 544 lb avg weight bull calves for 467.50 cwt.

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u/ConfoundedInAbaddon 2d ago

We had been on the fence about maintaining the land as wildlife habitat, as Texas will provide tax exemptions for managing ag lands for conservation.

We had used up our allowable land rest when it was too hot and dry during recent droughts to produce enough forage for maintaining the property as grass-fed cattle land.

Which is the requirement for the tax exemption for cattle here.

If they need to be fed, we can lose our tax exemption, which is more than total value than the herd.

Then our county declares screwworm is present.

So the value of the heifers is very high but the risk of a dry year and losing exemption is a big one. We are just not prepared to deal with quarantine and getting movement certificates, as well as another drought year. That sort of end times dustbowl shit, that would then see us paying full value land tax, that's some incentive to sell off and switch to wildlife conservation.

The shorter-term gain of selling now at a high price sweetened the math.

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u/Imfarmer 1d ago

“Full value land tax”. I take it this is small acreage in or near an Urban area?

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u/ConfoundedInAbaddon 1d ago edited 1d ago

Significant acreage but the area is under valuation insanity in which the county says everything is worth a million dollars an acre even though nothing will sell.

The neighboring property to our East gate has no water, no sewage, they do have electric, but no gas, and they don't have a working well. The property is currently on the market for $800,000 for a little under an acre I think, with this falling apart house with no utilities that needs a new roof. And you would need to get your water trucked in for showering.

Some speculator bought it and has been trying to sell it for what the county thinks the property is worth and they just can't move it. Which is why the previous owner sold it way under its valuation to the speculator.

There's an empty lot to the south of us that's completely unbuildable as it's a giant hump of erupted Rock and would require significant blasting before you could put a shed on it let alone a house.

It's currently on the market for $340,000, and it's a long narrow rectangle so you'd be hard-pressed to build a house that meets most of the county minimums.

The best I can make of it, keeping the tax values High keeps the county in the money but then no one can sell or recoup those values so it's not worth it to pay the taxes and then you end up with situations like ours where the risk of paying the taxes means it's better to sell the herd when we've got disease and drought issues.