The prices @skyhightree1 quoted are about what we have been seeing here too, for a couple of months. It is worth the weaning and feeding for us ONLY IF we are selling at the graded sale in Harrisonburg and they are colored as opposed to black. It did help us with the char and red steers back a couple of months ago. Haven't been to Staunton in a couple of weeks so don't know first hand but with this heat and humidity, most everyone isn't shipping anyway. I don't look for prices to be that much better until maybe late fall. The corn that has been planted as "cover crops" to make it eligible for the gov payments, will be allowed to be harvested for silage and might make feeder prices go up a bit after it is seen just how much there is. Anything needing finished on grain will be down as grain (corn) looks to still be high. As sky said, the writing was on the wall, and i tried to make sure we got as many steers (and a couple groups of heifers) sold off earlier this spring when it was still decent. Heifers have been in the 1.10 to 1.30 all along, so no big surprise there. We had alot of late spring calvings, so they won't be coming off the cows until late fall/winter at least. Got one group now of mostly heifers on cows, getting moved this next week off the pasture we are losing. Should have been moved this past weekend but we were finishing up the last of first cutting of over mature hay. Had alot of green 2nd growth coming up so not a total loss. Getting some rain too will bring these fields back. Sorghum-sudan will be ready to cut soon. 10+ acres of corn looking pretty good with the rains. We will have feed to hold calves over for awhile. We cut our numbers some and have more fall calving cows than we would like from holding back some opens when cows were $.25 and $.30 this past winter. Might sell some as breds or with calves, will just have to watch the markets. But we are down about 35 from last year, many were old cows that were open and we knew they were going to go and we lost some to the wet and cold miserable conditions. There are about 6-8 that are in a field to go and they will leave with their calves most likely later this fall. Not near a bull on purpose.
