One good year

It was a harbinger of things to come that my wife and I started our beef herd in 1974 which was one of the worst years in the modern history of the cow business. Thanks to two seven year drouths, a year where we had a 74 % breed up thanks to a neighbor’s Trichomoniases education program (he taught us all about Trich), and another year in which we decided to feed our calves and sell them to a packer, allowing us to treble our losses, I think all together we’ve had exactly one good year in the cow/calf business. And when I say it was a “good year” I mean that we maybe had a 5 % return on our investment and got paid about $1.25 per hour for our hard labor.