How One Local Feedlot Uses Performance Beef to Serve Their Community
Making any rural business work requires knowing the needs of the local community. Feedlots are no exception to this. Brother-in-laws, Connor Buchholz and Jacob Steiner with Dakota Prairie Beef, have found success in making this their focus.
“The goal of what we're doing over there is to fit our area,” says Buchholz, owner of Dakota Prairie Beef.
Dakota Prairie Beef is a feedlot located in the southwest corner of North Dakota. Its original owner focused on fat cattle, but Buchholz and Steiner have pivoted to focus on developing replacement heifers and backgrounding.
“The economics of feeding 40 heifers in in your own little lot, that's pretty tough,” shares Buchholz. “We’ve really done our best to lean into what the actual demand in the region is, which is somewhere where you can go to get your heifers backgrounded the way you want them.”
Tailoring business to the local community doesn’t come without its challenges. Depending on market fluctuations and drought conditions, feed cost is the biggest challenge Dakota Prairie Beef faces.
“On a dry year like this, they're primarily on a roughage ration just to grow right, develop their frame right, keep from getting too fleshy,” shares Steiner, the feedlot manager.
Shifting from feeding fat cattle to backgrounding created another challenge for Buchholz and Stiener – learning to adapt to slow business seasons.
Buchholz says, “If you're going to play the replacement heifer game, you're going to have a lot of business when you have a lot of business and then you're going to have some really dry months through the summer there.”
With their goal of keeping feed costs low for their customers, they’ve turned to Performance Beef to keep an edge on finances and animal management, specifically health.
“It just making the act of feeding more efficient,” explains Buchholz. “We want to run equipment that's efficient, so we can get feeding knocked out and get onto the next thing.”
In addition to the Dakota Prairie Beef site, time is also split between another feedlot and pastures. Even when they aren’t on site with employees during feeding, Buchholz and Steiner can login to Performance Beef to make changes or troubleshoot any issues.
“We can move cattle around in the system for the employees that are there, check billing and kind of do whatever we want from wherever we are and that's a really big piece for us,” shares Buchholz.
The animal health component of Performance Beef is one of Steiner’s favorite functions of the program.
He says, “When it comes to treating animals you can scan that animal's EID number and put enter exactly what you gave them, on what day what you treated them and what you treated them for.”
Weights can also easily be recorded every time an animal goes through the chute to track average daily gain. Knowing this metric allows Steiner to tailor nutrition programs to different groups of heifers.
“If they're overperforming or underperforming just a little bit, we can make changes to our rations,” explains Steiner.
The ability to track treatment records alongside average daily gain and other performance metrics helps both the feedlot and the rancher. Dakota Prairie Beef makes it a point to give this data back to the producer for future use in production systems.
“We would like to differentiate ourselves and give the rancher the information they need,” says Buchholz. “If we can provide data back to the producers that helps them make better decisions in their own operation.”
Their customers response to this data has been positive to say the least.
Buchholz shares, “The producers on the back end give us a lot of feedback that the reports are really easy to read, which to me is really important.”
At the end of the day Dakota Prairie Beef believes cattle feeding is a service industry that can greatly serve local economies. Leaning on efficient technologies and equipment is an important part of that process.
Listen to the full story on the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast.
