Just how many days have we added, and what has been the impact?
Noted cattle analyst Shawn Walter of Professional Cattle Consultants plots this data monthly from the millions of cattle fed by his extensive network of cooperators. According to his recent feedlot newsletter, the longer DOF trend began last July. We added five to 10 days in July and August, and by the first quarter of 2015, we had extended that by another 15 to 20 days.
You would logically expect to see a link to lighter placement weights, but it’s not there. We are placing heavier cattle on feed, and more than 30 percent of the 2014 placements exceeded 800 pounds.
As Walter notes, with fed cattle prices in the $1.50 to $1.60 per hundredweight (cwt) range and the cost of gains being around $.90 per cwt, the economic incentive says add as many pounds as possible. What makes this work even better is that 75 percent or more of those late pounds is in carcass weight, which is more profitable on the formulas and grids that account for most fed cattle marketing today.
As you would expect, this has driven carcass weights to all-new heights, with steers up 14 pounds and heifers 12 pounds for the year.
What are other impacts of adding days? Well, here are some things you likely did not know about longer feeding periods.
Our Certified Angus Beef feedlot database shows that for every 20 days that cattle are on feed, the percentage of choice and prime carcasses increases 3 to 4 points. Most of that is choice, but for a premium brand such as Certified Angus Beef, the increase in acceptance rates is 2 to 3 percentage points.
At the 2015 Plains Nutrition Conference, University of Nebraska animal scientists presented an abstract on the impact of longer DOF on carcass parameters and profitability. Good data on this was hard to find until now, so this is a valuable research contribution.
They allotted 114 crossbred steers to three feeding pens. One group was harvested at a normal finish end point of a half-inch fat cover, which turned out to be 142 DOF. A second group was fed another 21 days (163 DOF) and a third group 43 extra days (184 DOF).
The key economic impact (see Table 1) was the increased carcass weight, up 31 pounds and 80 pounds, respectively, for the two longer-fed cattle groups. Perhaps surprisingly, quality grade increased only slightly as marbling was 31 points higher for the longest-fed cattle. But keep in mind individual genetic potential plays a big role in grade as well, and that boost in marbling suggests a bigger impact on the share of cattle grading prime and premium choice.
As would be expected, yield grades (YG) were elevated, up to 31.6 percent YG 4s and 5s for the long-fed group. But in spite of that, profitability was significantly higher for the longest-fed cattle – by more than $50 per head after all added costs and discounts were figured in. 
Larry Corah
Consultant
Certified Angus Beef LLC
