Market Update with Kurt Kangas | Summer 2026

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to marketing cattle. Whether you’re selling at your local sale barn or marketing through a video sale platform, commercial producers are quite talented at finding the best fit for their cattle and their unique program goals.

As a continuation of our regular Market Update series, we invite you to join in the conversation as Kurt Kangas, American Angus Association regional manager, and Lynsey McAnally, associate editor of the Angus Beef Bulletin, chat about current trends in the cattle market, the potential for herd rebuild, news related to the U.S.-Mexico border, recent and upcoming video sales, and more.

Additional Resources:

• Commercial Programs at the American Angus Association
• AngusLink program information
• Subscribe to the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA

Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org. 

Transcript

Host Lynsey McAnally (00:28):
Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattleman. Brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin, we have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let’s get to work, shall we?

Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work! There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to marketing cattle. Whether you’re selling at your local sale barn or marketing through a video sale platform, commercial producers are quite talented at finding the best fit for their cattle and unique program goals.

As a continuation of our regular Market Update series, we invite you to join in the conversation as Kurt Kangas, American Angus Association regional manager, and Lynsey McAnally, associate editor of the Angus Beef Bulletin, chat about current trends in the cattle market, the potential for herd rebuild, news related to the U.S.-Mexico border, recent and upcoming video sales and more. So, let’s dive in!

Welcome to Angus at Work! I'm your host, Lynsey McAnally, and today we're joined by our very own Kurt Kangas. Kurt, welcome to the show!

Kurt Kangas (01:32):
Well, thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to sit down and talk with you today.

Host Lynsey McAnally (01:35):
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I think there's a lot in this conversation that our audience will take away and maybe have some thoughts on themselves. But first off, for those in our audience who might be encountering you for the first time, do you mind introducing yourself and giving us a little history on your experience in the cattle industry?

Kurt Kangas (01:53):
Sure thing. Yeah. My name is Kurt Kangas and I work for the American Angus Association as a regional manager up here in Montana, Wyoming and Alaska, which they don't let me go to very often. Graduated from Montana State University with a Bachelor's of Science degree in range management and did range veg, range rehabilitation, range veg mapping, and fought wildfires and did prescribed burns right out of college. Did some elk hunting, elk guiding, and then was nightcalving up at Base in Angus Ranch. And that nightcalving job turned into a full-time job where I worked for Basin Angus for right around 10-11 years doing everything on the ranch from marketing bulls to folks that I knew, to AI, anything on the ranch, welding, fixing things, pretty much all around ranchhand there. When Doug sold the ranch in 2010, I went back and helped a friend on a farm in California for about eight to 10 months doing some research on how his family could integrate a more corporate structure into their family ag operation, which had grown substantially.

In that time, the Regional Manager job came open for the region [covering] California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. I took that job with Angus, which is very great place to start. I knew a lot of the producers out there from when I was a kid and growing up in the Central Valley of California myself. Started there. Then when the job came open in Montana, I wanted to get back to Montana. I took the job up here in I think 2014 - ish range and have been up here ever since and really enjoy the opportunity to work with our membership and our commercial producers as well and helping them with all things Angus. It's a very rewarding job for me and I enjoy the people, enjoy the cattle, and obviously enjoy fishing in Montana. I also enjoy being close to Bobcat Stadium where we will be the defending national champions this year for FCS football.

Host Lynsey McAnally (03:50):
I was going to say for an outdoorsman like you, you are in the prime spot.

Kurt Kangas (03:55):
Yes, yes. Also enjoy fly fishing quite a bit.

Host Lynsey McAnally (03:58):
Beautiful country.

Kurt Kangas (03:59):
I also do a lot of the price reporting for Northern Livestock video auctions up here in Montana, and I enjoy that because it gives me pretty good insight to what these markets have done.

Host Lynsey McAnally (04:08):
So that leads really well into the bulk of what we're going to be talking about today, which is summer video sales. And so I'm going to let the expert talk on that, but do you mind telling our audience a little bit about what sales you've been to and how those have gone the last month or so?

Kurt Kangas (04:24):
I should specify, too, I am not an expert. I'm an observer. That's important. And so I work with Western Livestock Video Auction and I work with Northern Livestock Video Auction. I go to both of those guys' sales. I'll go to some cattle country sale, cattle country video sales when I'm around. So I get to a lot of these video sales, and if I'm not at a video sale, I generally watch the video sales pretty closely, particularly when they're selling this region's cattle just to keep up with the markets and see how our commercial producers have done in the season. It's a great insight into people's mentality on how they're thinking. It greatly influences obviously our fall bull sale seasons from a registered perspective. It's also a connection point for talking about different programs with Angus as we're at these video sales and people have questions and video sales are pretty busy and we're pretty busy during video sales helping the auction market and those companies run the sales.

But at the same time, I get a lot of calls after sales with people asking questions about what does this program do? What does this program do? I used to do a lot of audits when we had the NHTC never-ever claims that we'd run, and I really enjoyed doing those audits and got a good connection. So I understand the programs very well. The people really value my opinion on what to do on program cattle and stuff like that. That being said, the star video sales that I've been to, I've been to obviously all the northern sales and then Western video market, and it's been an interesting year to watch, obviously. There's been some little more volatility in this summer than there was last summer where we saw that constant run up on cattle all the way through the cycle. This time June was a really, really good market.

Heifers are probably a little soft then and a good buy. Heifers have come up or haven't lost as much ground as the steers have since the June market. And it's looking like obviously the board is not helping out. There's lots of announcements that are floating around the opening of the southern border, things like that, that all impact our markets pretty heavily. And it seems like these buyers up here, they'll shake off a two to $3 drop in the market, but when it goes limit down, it's tough for those guys to shake that off. So we've seen a decrease in prices, but overall, by and large, through all weight classes and all video companies, quite honestly, the prices are still higher than last year. And that's something that people need to keep in mind that this market is definitely down some, but it's still a heck of a market for people to participate in.

If you go back two to three years, it's substantially higher than those markets. So it's been an interesting one to watch, to participate in. Like I said, the June market ... And I get it. Everybody's looking at that June market and it was so good. It's just the nature of a video cycle that we rarely see the thing run up all the way through. I think I look back through six years at data and very rarely do we see this thing literally track up like it did last year. Usually there are market changes in it. I remember when the Holcomb Fire hit. That would that be four years ago now or something like that? We had Western Video down in Cheyenne started the next day, and they sure felt that. That was a very volatile part of the market. That's the nice part about a video sale is you do have options to not sell cattle.

Host Lynsey McAnally (07:41):
Sure. That flexibility I think gives a lot of people confidence on the seller side and the buyer side, too. Which kind of rolls into ... Do you mind talking a little bit about what buyers specifically were placing emphasis on during those video sales?

Kurt Kangas (07:58):
Yeah, right now with the cattle inventories where they sit and there's not a ton of cattle out there. The yearling numbers I think on all companies has dropped some as drought has hit different areas. Guys have had to unload those yearlings earlier. There's some ranches up here that they sold their yearlings and now they're going to sell their calves because they don't have any grass. So what the buyers are interested in, obviously the yearlings have good interest from certain buyers. The calves, there's really good interest in those light grass cattle getting up that 600-weight. There can be a sea of those coming in the fall and there's a sea of those in all the video sales. So those prices probably are a little softer than normal. Then you get back up to those heavier calves, the 650s to 800s off the cow and weaned.

There's pretty solid support there. The weaned cattle market, the weaned calf market has been really good and it's paid. You could look at the data through either Western or Northern and in Western weaning, a lot of those cattle sell weaned. They have a very high percentage of them sell weaned where Northern has a relatively low percentage of them sell weaned. And the wean market this year has really paid, particularly if you've stuck a program or two on them to help those prices out. The demand there is fairly strong, particularly these prices. These guys like the fact that if you wean them, theoretically, they don't have to stay on the death loss, which I think we can all understand it. Still anywhere from 2,500 to $3,000 calves.

Host Lynsey McAnally (09:34):
I think it was Derrell Peel in December when I spoke with him. He said it's hard to predict what's going to happen in the market sometimes because we don't have a crystal ball to be able to look at the future. But do you have any expectations or thoughts on what the fall cattle market could look like?

Kurt Kangas (09:52):
It's very hard to say. A lot of this, what we see right now is based on announcements coming from the USDA in D.C. that are affecting these markets fairly substantially. Their timing of making those announcements is questionable, I think in a lot of people's opinions, on when they're doing this. What the fall looks like? I think this thing ... I don't even know if I think it, I hope it. That this thing will kind of balance out. Could we see prices go back up some? We might, but could we see them go down slightly? I think we sure could too. That's me taking a pretty bullish stand or a pretty solid stand on what's going to happen. But yeah, I'd say right now there's a lot of people out there that are questioning what might happen. The fundamentals don't change though. We have the lowest cow herd inventory in the United States in several decades.

So that underlying fundamental does not change. The Mexican border opening up is going to be a question on how many people are ... Will it be a mass influx of cattle coming in? That's a question that I think that only time's going to answer. Down south they've figured out how to process the cattle, how to feed the cattle. It's conceivable that we don't see a huge influx, but there's certainly areas in the United States that it's important that they have those cattle that we talked about, the feedlots in Texas that depend on them that are for sale. We sure don't want to see us lose any more feeding capacity in the United States. The fall run, it's going to be interesting and we could roll this into the conversation about what do we see for herd expansion? That's all a big question mark.

Are we going to expand? We've sure seen some super high heifer calves sell this year that I know that people that bought them, they bought them to breed them. And 575 pounders that crossed $6.00/pound in the last video sale appeared in Billings. The high quality replacement females could be worth as much as they ever have been, but they still got to make sense on paper. With the drought that's consumed much of the western United States. Do we see that there's going to be enough feed supply? There's areas that have enough hay, there's areas that don't have enough hay. There's areas looking to buy a lot of hay. Particularly in the Intermountain West from Colorado all the way up to Montana, it's going to be interesting to see what people do and what's a bread heifer worth this fall. Boy, that's another tough question.

Host Lynsey McAnally (12:20):
So a lot of our listeners are already going to be familiar with a program through the association called AngusLink. For any new listeners that we have joining us today, do you mind giving us a general overview of what AngusLink is? Then we can jump into maybe what some of the benefits and interest at these video sales was for that program?

Kurt Kangas (12:38):
Yeah. So AngusLink is a value-added program that the Angus Association has evolved over the last five years, I think maybe six. It helps producers buying registered Angus bulls to promote those cattle at these video sales or at an auction market through a series of numbers that would identify them as being super high for carcass or maternal or feedlot or beef, like the dollar values we have in the current system of the American Angus Association. It can highlight those cattle and we're not trying to promote that you need the very, very highest. We'd see some of those, anything above 100 is better than average. So we see a lot of those 120s, 130s bring as much money as the very, very top end. So it's not a maximization program at all. It's a useful program for the people, the feeders that are buying them, and that they could maybe know how to manage those cattle slightly different through a little bit of insight on what we provide in those numbers.

It's a program that's gained a lot of interest, particularly in the Western video market. They're a huge, huge section superior. We'll be selling this week a huge swath of AngusLink cattle, and it's popular up here at Northern, too, in Billings. It's a program that the people that participate in it have taken pretty good pride in what they've bought for bull power and who they bought them from. It's a good way to differentiate those cattle when you're selling anywhere from 100,000 ... to 300,000 head of cattle for these video companies in a day. Having something different on the screen, a different badge, something to draw the eye to the draw attention to it. It's a valuable resource to differentiate those cattle in this marketplace. It could tend to sometimes look a little bit flooded even though cattle numbers are down. And also they have a webpage where buyers, and we send out an email to a lot of buyers that identifying these Angus Link calves so they get an updated list before these video sales starts to let them know what lot numbers are selling, where they are, the description of the cattle, what company they're selling with.

It's a good service, I think, to the commercial producers.

Host Lynsey McAnally (14:40):
No, thank you for that overview. I think it's a program that we talk about quite a bit in the Angus Beef Bulletin for good reason, but it's always good to get back to the basics and talk about the fundamentals of that program itself for anyone who might not be familiar in it and who may be hoping or potentially looking at getting into that. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw as far as demand on those AngusLink cattle in these summer video sales?

Kurt Kangas (15:05):
Demand's been strong. Whether Western, Northern or Superior, we see good demand on these cattle that are in AngusLink or Angus Verified. Being able to look at those bull batteries and for buyers to be able to see what they're buying. I think buyers appreciate that kind of information. We are moving more and more toward an information-driven market where people want to know these things are high enough. There's a lot of risk in these cattle. They're hard to hedge. They're hard to buy securely and not be underwater immediately the day that you buy them. And so AngusLink just provides a little bit more of a cushion for those guys to maybe feel a little more confident in doing that. When you look at the pricing, we've seen good premiums on the AngusLink cattle. A lot of those cattle, I will fully admit they are in other programs.

Most of them are NHTC minimum. A lot of them are Never Ever Three. A lot of them carry the different claims from different companies, whether it's IMI or Earth Claims or they'll carry a Global Animal Partnership (GAP) certification or a Raised Well certification now that goes along with those. When I look at the data on how these things do in these video sales, and we talk about premiums because that's what everybody wants to know: What will this get me? I can look at the data from almost all the video companies on these AngusLink calves and I can see where when we talk about premiums, everybody thinks about the highest point in the market. Are these cattle topping the market? Yes, there are some that are topping the markets on those days. But when you really look at this program, what I notice when I look at the price analysis from Northern or Western is that these cattle are not on the bottom end of the spectrum. They're not on the bottom by anywhere from 2 to 12% higher than what the conventional cattle sell for.

In my mind, that's where the premium is. Are we going to get you the top of the market? That maybe yes, maybe no. But there's hardly any data except when you start to get in the heifers because some of those replacement type heifers are going to bring a lot of money and those don't carry any programs on and all except for reputation. But when you look at the low change on average for the video sales, very, very rarely do you see the Angus Link cattle be on that low. I mean, they are usually well above the low market for the cattle on any given sale. So when you talk about premiums, your premium is you've moved your average where you're going to land, not where you're going to land, where hypothetically you'll land. It might not be toward the top, but you also won't be toward the bottom.

You'll be more toward the mean of the sale, which sometimes that is a premium. Premiums aren't always top in the market. There's a lot of things that go into pricing. These feeder cattle for these buyers' reputation is obviously number one that you could have cattle with everything on them. If the buyers don't know who they are, they're going to spend less money on it. They're not going to take as much risk as they would say for cattle that have been on a video for 8-10 years selling the same video sale. Selling the same day, selling the same weight class. These buyers get very, very comfortable buying those cattle. They know the risks. They know what they're going to get. When you look at premiums or you look at anything like that, the pricing structure, what we've seen, it's going video sale to video sale.

These cattle, the AngusLink cattle are outperforming low end range and topping some areas.

Host Lynsey McAnally (18:35):
So in the last Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA, we reported on the record monthly enrollment for AngusLink in June. From your perspective, what do you think is fueling that level of enrollment? Yeah.

Kurt Kangas (18:48):
I'm not surprised by that. When you look at the video cycle, July is our biggest month for video sales. We'll sell the most cattle, whether it's Western, Northern, superior cattle country. I think there's a couple other live ag. This is the big push of cattle that we'll sell in the video July. I think that's a lot of people were questioning a lot of questions going into this deal like, okay, with the drought, when am I going to have to ship? When am I going to have to do this? Are these prices going to be good enough that I really don't need the programs? That's always a decision that somebody has to make in their own mind. But I think we saw that big push in June strictly because this is our big month that we're selling all these cattle. Western and early July, a lot of those cattle would've been AngusLink.

Northern would've had their biggest push. Obviously this week that Western or Superior Winnemucca, they're going to have their big push from all the Palouse cattle and then northern Nevada cattle selling. Those are all big customers, big ranches, big outfits. A lot of head in those deals. There's not a lot of smaller groups selling there. Those ranches that run out there in Nevada are pretty big. But I think that accounts for a lot of the big jump in the enrollments that we saw.

Host Lynsey McAnally (20:05):
So with all of that said, with that record enrollment and talking about what's fueling that enrollment, where do you think those cattle are headed? Are they headed to video sales or where are we going to see those cattle sell and where are people going to have the opportunity to purchase them?

Kurt Kangas (20:22):
Yeah, the big push is going to be in these video sales. A lot of them have already probably already sold. For sure the steermates have sold. When you look at the heifer mates, some video companies will sell most of their heifers in August, but a lot of those companies, most of those cattle are going to sell here and the video sale's coming up. The auction, if they're going to run in the auction markets in the fall, those guys probably have a little more time to make those decisions. That will be what carries us forward here in our enrollments as we get the end of this week done and we'll have a vast majority of the cattle that we're going to sell sold. We'll be well over halfway done with the number of cattle we're going to sell in the video sales. Even the early August markets that are coming up for Western, Superior and Northern, a lot of those cattle, they got enrolled all in June because it's the first time the guys had to enroll.

But yeah, I'd expect 90% of those cattle probably end up on a video sale somewhere. Where I think we don't see a lot of AngusLink usages and split loads. I think that split loads are something or loads that traditionally trade lower unless sometimes they trade at market or maybe a little above market. But in a split load situation, if you're particularly from these video sales, helping differentiate those loads of cattle, the split loads could add a lot of value to what you're selling. If you're a guy or a gal that has three-quarter steers and need to fill a load up, so you're going to put on the rest of the load with heifers, making those cattle different, differentiating those cattle from the rest of the split loads could really be beneficial. Using AngusLink and NHTC verifications on them can really help, I think, in those deals.

I'm trying to get a way to look at that data, but split loads are tough because they're described differently in the price structures, which makes them hard to twist the data out of. I think I found a way to do it that could be pretty interesting to see. But I think the real opportunity for guys that are selling the video or gals that are selling the video is that using that, the split load situation is a model that maybe when you see the split loads come up, generally you'll sell a whack of split loads at the same time and it could be three, four, five to 10 to 15 lots of them in a row. And there's folks that they'll buy them to be sure, but there's not near the enthusiasm that you see on those whole loads of straight steers or straight heifers.

Differentiating those split loads I think could really benefit a commercial cattleman if you have.

Host Lynsey McAnally (22:58):
We talked a little bit before I hit record. I'm a chatter for those folks listening in who may not already be aware, but we talked a little bit about the state of moisture in different parts of the U.S. and where our forages are at in different parts of the U.S. It looks a little bleak. Depending on where our listeners are located in the country and what their own grass is looking like, retaining heifers might be on their mind right now. What are your thoughts on the current prospect of herd rebuild?

Kurt Kangas (23:29):
In this region in particular, particularly down in Wyoming, Colorado, parts of Nebraska, it's going to be interesting to see. Lots of folks have already trimmed around the herd some. They got rid of the super old cows. They got rid of the two coming threes earlier this spring. They've kept that core running age group of cows that should win you the bigger calves. If those folks decide to start retaining heifers, it's going to depend on what this market does, I think. It's hard. Last year when you looked at the price of these heifers that were selling on the video sales, it was high, substantially high. I really don't begrudge anybody that thinks that taking money and paying off debt or putting some money in your pocket is a bad idea. I don't think it is a bad idea, but I think with this increasing market we've seen through the last couple of years, and when I look at the northern data, we've sold more heifers every year than the year before, last couple years, which tells me that we're probably not seeing a herd expansion quite yet.

It'll be interesting to see as we get into this coming fall, if people decide to maybe keep some heifers as this market holds maybe flat to slightly down. Does it make more sense now as the time to go ahead and retain those heifers and get some bread? There are people in droughty areas that are planning on keeping heifers. It's always interesting. I had a friend of mine tell me I can't plan on a drought. I got to assume it's going to rain.

And being an optimist, none of us were optimists, and I realize there are a lot of pessimists in our business as well, but if you're on the grass, you can't be a pessimist all the time. You got to assume it's going to rain again for these droughty areas. It's just a question of when and does the retention match what you're going to have available for feed? Hay prices are starting to creep up pretty substantially around a lot of these droughted out areas. As I sit here looking out my window doing this podcast and you can't see five miles because of the smoke.

That's pretty bleak for I think most people's attitude on retaining heifers. And there's years where people are going to wonder, is it going to be cheaper to buy a heifer this year in the fall than it will be to retain one. Just get the check immediately off the calf this next year. So there's a lot of things that play into retention unless we start retaining heifers. I don't know that this herd grows, but I see who's buying these cattle on these video companies on these video sales. A lot of these heifers are going to feed. That's the bottom line, that the money's good for the producer and they've run the numbers on it and there'd be some replacement quality heifers that have sold that have went to feed.

Host Lynsey McAnally (26:19):
What do you think with all of that said and all of that kind of able to digest with the listenership, what do you think that means for Angus bull demand in the future?

Kurt Kangas (26:31):
Oh, this last year was, obviously, I didn't anticipate the bull market to be as high as it was. And, honestly, as we kind of trudged through spring I was fairly impressed with people's ability to need bulls when it was still pretty dry in a lot of places. There's some areas that have seen some relief up on the highline of Montana, which is north of the Milk River area, that they've seen substantial rain. And so those guys, you really go up there in April and it was pretty dry, and now it's greener than any other place almost in the state of Montana or Wyoming. Bull demand was extraordinary this year. We get to the end of sales season, it's predictable as always. You start getting calls in mid-June for guys that need 20 bulls for X, Y, Z project. For heifer projects.

So I think demand will remain good for these bulls that are out there price-wise. Is it higher or lower? I'm going to stop guessing on that because I tend to be wrong just about every year.

Host Lynsey McAnally (27:36):
That's fair. It goes back to the crystal ball comment, right?

Kurt Kangas (27:39):
Yes. Yes.

Host Lynsey McAnally (27:40):
If we only had one of those, it would make life a little bit easier or maybe not.

Kurt Kangas (27:44):
Maybe not.

Host Lynsey McAnally (27:45):
Maybe we don't need to know that quite so soon. Any advice for commercial cattlemen going into the fall with regard to either their cow herd marketing calves, thoughts around buying bulls as we head into that fall sale season?

Kurt Kangas (27:59):
Yeah, very few people know what this market's going to be come, let's say September, October, November when we start the auction market runs. They sure could be higher because those are technically immediate delivery cattle. People will know where they're short on numbers by then. Make sure those calves are getting two rounds of shots in them. Those shots pay. If you watch these video sales, people that throw the cattle up there with no shots or one round of shots at branding generally don't get as much for their calves as folks that give two round of shots. The big question's going to be, is it going to be worth weaning them and send them in weaned?

That's a good question. I always recommend people run the math on that, on you got to figure in your death loss, figure in your cost of gain or cost of maintain just to feed the cattle, to get them 45 days minimum weaned. Where that puts you in the market cycle, which if you're delivering in late November, what does your storm situation look like? That's the big hindrance up here to people weaning calves is that you could catch that November snowstorm that could kill some. That goes for December as well. So that's why you don't see a ton of weaned calves come out of the state of Montana. It's just a riskier business up here. But if you have the means to wean them, if you're familiar with weaning calves, I think that a weaning calf could pay fairly well.

Host Lynsey McAnally (29:29):
So with all of that said, the July 1 cattle inventory report, which came out on Friday, says cattle on feed is up 2%. Beef cow numbers in that report are down 1%. So if cow numbers are down, the border is still close to date, but with plans to reopen in a phase reopening ... Is timing of cattle movement driving the on-feed numbers up or is that longer days on feed?

Kurt Kangas (29:57):
Oh, I think you could argue it's longer days on feed You can tell that by the carcass weights of these cattle that we're seeing that are coming out of the plants, that we're pushing these plants pretty hard for size of carcass. I think that's a big driver is how many cattle are hanging around. We're higher on carcass weight this year than the last year, but we're also seeing more primes. Our grading has gone way up, which is good. These American consumers have gotten very, very comfortable with the good product at a higher price point. I think as long as we maintain those higher grades, the demand will remain strong for beef. I do think that it'll be interesting to see, as we talked about before, what impact does the border opening up really have? How many head are we talking about? What does the government do to countries where if those cattle do come across, what does the government do with other imported beef areas?

Do we put more tariffs on them to slow that down? It's a good question.

Host Lynsey McAnally (30:58):
We were speaking again, there's a lot of conversation that typically happens unrelated to the podcast prior to hitting the record button, which is the beautiful thing about podcasting. But we were talking about how hot it has been in certain parts of the US. I told you yesterday, 9:00 p.m. in the evening, we were still at 103 [degrees] here in the Oklahoma Panhandle. You were sharing that Billings hit what temp?

Kurt Kangas (31:24):
116, 118 [degrees].

Host Lynsey McAnally (31:26):
That is unreal. So with that said, it's been incredibly hot across, I would say, the majority of the country. Even in some of the northern territories that maybe we wouldn't expect it in. What does a heat wave event like that mean in terms of feedlot performance? Does that affect days on feed? Is that going to affect quality grades? What are we looking at with these temperatures this summer?

Kurt Kangas (31:53):
Yeah, Montana, Wyoming, we don't feed a ton of cattle up here. The heat cycles up here are different than the heat cycles down where you are in that we actually still do cool off to 65 degrees at night so the cattle can be comfortable. But it slows the cattle down. I would think they go off feed up here. We don't have the humidity of other places, so these cattle do get a break and there's never a day the wind doesn't blow up here, it seems like anymore. More a bigger question for the heat for me is what is it doing to these commercial cattle producers and the registered cattle producers? I've heard stories down in Wyoming where the grass is so dry that if the cattle walk through it, that they just break the grass off and they don't have anything to graze on.

The feed just falls apart with the slightest breezes and it's Wyoming, so the wind always blows. So that's going to be the concerning part. If we don't get some kind of relief in this region in the fall, which we haven't had for the last couple of years, it could be pretty interesting to see what the state of the range is at the end of this summer. It could be in fairly poor condition.

Host Lynsey McAnally (33:03):
Well, I would say if we've forgotten something, you can always leave us a note in the show notes and we can revisit, but I don't think there's anything off the top of my head that we've forgotten to talk about today. But listeners, [here's an] open invitation. If there is something that you are curious about that's market related, anything that comes up in this conversation that has sparked thoughts in your mind about where the cattle cycle's headed, where heifer retention's headed, you're always welcome to drop a note in the comments on whatever podcast platform that you listen on. We do see those. We are happy to add that into either an Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA story or maybe our next podcast. Kurt, I just want to tell you thank you so much for joining us. I always love our conversations, particularly related to anything beef industry.

We always like to end Angus at work on a positive note. I think this conversation you said earlier, it can get a little dark in places, but we're talking about the beef industry as a whole. I think we work in a great industry and with a great group of people. But what is one thing happening in your life personally or professionally that you're thankful for? Could be more than one thing too, if you just have a burning desire to air all the wonderful things happening for Kurt Kangas.

Kurt Kangas (34:28):
That's a tough one. You should let me know that question before.

Host Lynsey McAnally (34:33):
Usually I do, but I felt like you were prepared for this. I felt like you would.

Kurt Kangas (34:37):
I don't think about my optimism very much.

Host Lynsey McAnally (34:40):
Oh, that's sad.

Kurt Kangas (34:43):
I do think that it's important for people to remember that these prices that we see, they're still lifetime highs. And that's important for people to keep in the back of their minds that yeah, the market slips some, but these prices are still very, very good. Last year was very, very good. People's grandparents would be so excited or great-grandparents would be so excited to see the amount of money their calves are finally bringing. I get it. Inputs are high, fuel's high and all that stuff. But remain optimistic in this market and everybody should be in good shape. Me personally, yeah, I'm excited to get to see some family this summer that's super exciting that I haven't seen in a while. Just thankful for all my friends that I have out here in the industry. It's really a wonderful industry full of wonderful people.

Host Lynsey McAnally (35:39):
I say this every episode, but I can't think of a better way to end that. Depending on who we talk to, the answer that they give, it always brings a smile to my face and I hope that it does for our listeners as well. But Kurt, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you for the insights that you gave us on summer video sales, where the cycle is headed and kind of what to expect down the line.

Kurt Kangas (36:01):
Well, thank you for having me on. It's always fun to talk to computer screen for a couple hours.

Host Lynsey McAnally (36:06):
Note taken.

Kurt Kangas (36:07):
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Host Lynsey McAnally (36:16):
Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattlemen. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work!