Young producer shares tips on starting a cattle business without land

It’s hard today for first-generation ranchers to start raising cattle without a land base, but there are innovative ways to do it.

Sage Askin, a young rancher based in Lusk, built a multi-state livestock operation starting with nothing but a used pickup and a horse trailer.  

“I thought I could find a ranch to lease and start by running somebody else’s cattle custom grazing on rented land,” Askin shares. “I wanted to buy cattle, but when I talked to bankers, they wouldn’t loan money to someone who had nothing and no family to back me.”

Askin put up his pickup as collateral and was able to get a $17,000 line of credit, hoping to make more money from custom grazing than he and his wife would pay out for land rent.

“I think more ranches are available to lease now than they were 10 years ago just because a lot of people have invested in land but are not actively running it. Many of the places one might be able to lease have not had the best care, however, and may not be very productive,” he admits. 

“They may take a lot of work,” Askin adds. “If you find land available, there is usually a reason it’s up for lease, so you’ll have to work harder and maybe do some different things to make it work. For example, if you can turn it into a stocker operation, you can generally find clients who need summer pasture, and you won’t have to buy hay or winter any cows.”

Today, he and his wife Faith operate on a variety of leased and owned property, offering custom grazing services for sheep and goats as well as cow/calf pairs and stocker cattle. They also develop heifers for other ranchers and have some Dorper-influenced Mountain West Hair Sheep and Rambouillet sheep of their own as well.

Multiple enterprises 

Sage and Faith were able to grow their livestock business to where they could start buying land. 

“This is a significant part of our balance sheet, but it’s fueled by our other operations which are mainly leased lands and custom grazing, running other people’s livestock,” he shares.

Askin wanted to own cows but moved toward sheep and stocker cattle, noting these two things tend to be more predictably profitable, producing money they can invest in land.

“The first year of custom grazing we did make a little money, but it was easy to eat it up in equipment and other expenses,” Askin admits. “One of our better investments was a portable chute and portable panels.”

He recommends having multiple enterprises – sheep might help pay for some cattle.  

“Our return on this money has been higher than anything we could have done in cattle. The cattle situation did come around, but it was only due to the market coming up even higher. Today, however, who knows if the market is going to go up, down or sideways,” he says.

Grazing management and stockmanship

Grazing management and stockmanship are also important when leasing land. 

“We still have to bid as much as anyone else to get a lease,” Askin says. “The people who own the ranch would usually like to have a young, energetic person take it on, but the younger guy is still unproven. You still have to bid up there with the big guys but do better with the land – it’s the only way to prove you can do it.”  

If the owners see progress, they are more likely to keep the individual as a renter.

“We have found good intensive grazing programs have helped us as one of the ways we can do better than the folks we had to outbid for the lease, and the thing that best complements it is good stockmanship,” he adds.

“We can easily handle a herd of 400 to 500 pairs by ourselves, and anyone who works with us can manage a herd of cows this way,” he continues. “It is the same with our yearling stockers. We can get yearlings to respect a one-strand hot wire within a couple of days. It’s the only way we can effectively manage 1,200 to 1,300 yearlings all by ourselves.”

Mistakes

Askin feels his worst mistakes in the livestock business have been with marketing.  

“Sometimes you get backed into a corner,” he states. “We’ve had many instances in which I had a planned livestock sale date and had to go ahead and sell at that time. A term note is one of those situations. You probably need at least enough reserve at all times to be able to make a note payment without having to sell some animals if it’s not a good time to sell.”

“You don’t want to have all of your eggs in one basket and then be backed into a corner when it is time to market them and not have any way out,” he adds.

Even those who own the ranch need to try to market their animals optimally. A lot of ranchers do a great job of raising and managing cattle, but a poor job of marketing so their cattle may not bring what they are worth, he states.  

“I’ve learned marketing is more important than genetics,” Askin says. “Genetics are important down the road – after you’ve become established – and livestock producers are certainly being paid for good genetics, but the more important thing for us is marketing. We try to focus on how best to market whatever we have.”

Askin says it’s also important to be frugal.  

“With one set of cows we bought, we went to May calving – less work and less feed costs – and we leased bulls. We didn’t compete with people who had a lot more money than us at the bull sales. We learned we could lease some really good bulls that were better than what we could afford to buy, and our breeding cost per cow was quite a bit lower,” he explains.

“The bulls we leased were from reputable breeders who trich test. Our costs to run a cow were very low, and because we ran a lower-cost operation on leased land – where we didn’t necessarily know where our cattle were going to be in the future – this was the best way to go,” he adds. 

“You can spend time building a genetics program to fit a certain ranch, and then if you have to move and find a new place to lease, it suddenly doesn’t matter anymore,” Askin concludes. “I think a person should focus more on marketing and less on genetics until they own their own ranch.”

Heather Smith Thomas is a corresponding writer for the Wyoming Livestock Roundup. Send comments on this article to roundup@wylr.net.