Trying to figure out the price of a herd of cattle. Cows, maybe some pigs and sheep added in. This is strictly for research for a fictional story, and I don’t need to be too accurate (to be blunt), but I’d like to be close. Or at least moderately believable. I’ve done some googling but am getting technical stock price figures set at price per pound, and I don’t have a clue what the animals weigh to begin with.
So some quick questions –
what’s the typical size of a herd? 100 cows? 500? And what kind of price range would buying an existing heard go for? I have no idea if it’s $10 or $500,000.
Seriously, very rough ball park figures are all I need. Just frustrating that all I can find via search engines is very specific, technical data. Anyone have experience in this?
For mostly grown meat cattle $500 a head is a good ballpark average. Herd size can be any number and is only limited by the range land and other resources available. Dairy cows go for about $1000 a head.
Perfect, I can work with that. thank you!
Google up “cattle for sale” or “cattle classified ads” and you’ll find a lot of listings, which should also help guide you. (Ditto other animal species.)
Bah. So obvious I never even considered it! =/
Thanks!
Note that the price given ($500 per head) is for your normal feeder beef cattle – ones that will be going to the slaughterhouse in a few months. And dairy cows are about double that.
But there are also high-quality, carefully bred ‘foundation stock’ cattle. These are bred to be the start of your own herd, and go for much higher prices – 4 - 10 times as much as that normal price.
And the typical size of a herd?
Depends on how much land you have, and how good the land is. Here in the midwest USA, the range is from ½ to 4 acres per grazing beef animal. For dairy cattle, the limit is how much time you can spend milking them twice a day.
It depends on what kind of herd you’re talking about. There are commercial dairy farms that are essentially run like milk factories - the cows stay indoors all day and there are shifts of workers who feed and milk them around the clock. These operations can easily have hundreds of cows but they don’t really have a “farm” feel to them. If you’re looking at a traditional family dairy farm the herd is probably going to top out around 100 cows.