Great Start to 2025
contributed article by Kirk Lynch
Lynch Livestock Inc. and Humeston Livestock Exchange, Humeston, Iowa

Well, 2025 has sure started out with a bang. It seems that every day to start the year, the market kept going up. I had several people ask me, “What are (fill in the blank) worth?” I finally got to the point that I had to say, “Today they are worth (this), tomorrow or next week I cannot tell you.”
A little bit of what we have been seeing in the barns. On the fat cattle side we have seen some fats all the way up to mid-teens, crushing any record of past sale toppers. We see cash bids in the country lagging but still extraordinarily strong in that $2.05 range and seem to continue to go up every week.
Being the fat cattle market has taken off; the weigh cow and bull market has followed. Seeing several high yielding cows bringing in that $1.20 to $1.40 range and bulls up to the $1.50 range. With the fat cattle market continuing to creep up, I would look for this market to stay strong unless there is some sort of event where there is a major loss of newborns or small calves to where ranchers would just dump cows that lose a calf.
The feeder market has just been crazy hot. For every $5 that fat goes up it seems that feeders go up $20. Every week, I hear of a bigger set of calves that break the $4 and $3 marks. The simplest way to sum up the market is it seems to be getting higher every day and lightweight cattle will bring the high teens per head and the big cattle will bring in the low $2,000s per head.
With the short numbers, the consensus that there is an abundance of feed, and the white-hot fat and feeder markets, the breeding stock market has been excellent. Most bred heifers bringing $3,000 to $4,000 and cows falling in line behind them.
One side note, it will be interesting what bottle calves bring this spring. I have seen some calves already bringing in the $1,200 range and March through May is generally the top of the market for these calves.
At some point all these markets must plateau and stabilize a bit. But overall, 2025 is off to an amazing start and things look great for this year. Until next month!
Kirk Lynch, Lynch Livestock Inc., Lineville, Iowa
Kirk is the beef division manager for Lynch Livestock Inc. and oversees all aspects of their backgrounding and cattle feeding operations throughout Iowa and Kansas. He is also deeply involved in the Humeston Livestock Exchange in Humeston, Iowa. In addition, Kirk and his wife Mary own and operate Heartland Simmentals in northeast Iowa, which is a seedstock operation that consists of 500 registered Simmental and Angus cows. They have four children: Gabrielle (11), Brayden (9), Vivian (7), and Bianca (4).
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