What happens if cattle prices fall?
Should you sell your calves or background them?
How do you prepare for a dry season or the cost of a Canadian winter?

In this episode, Grahame Rees and Mel Kiel join Canadian livestock producers to explore how KLR Marketing principles help turn uncertainty into clearer, more confident decisions.

Drawing on Bud Williams’ sell-buy principles and their own practical experience, Grahame and Mel explain how balancing Grass, Money and Livestock can uncover opportunities in rising, steady and falling markets.

The focus is on making decisions with the information you have today: your available feed, your costs and the price relationship between the animals you own and those you could replace them with.

In this episode

• Balancing Grass, Money and Livestock: Recognising when your inventories are getting out of balance and taking action before your options narrow.

• Matching livestock to available feed: How Mel changes animal classes to suit pasture quality, seasonal conditions and the time available.

• Accounting for Canadian winter feeding: Including stored and purchased feed in your feed inventory and Cost of Carry.

• Understanding your true costs: Bringing overheads and direct costs into each livestock decision, including a grazing rate that accounts for the cost of using your own land.

• Looking beyond the sale price: Why the relationship between selling and replacement prices matters more than either price in isolation.

• Finding opportunity in a falling market: Grahame shares an Australian example where lower replacement prices helped maintain trading margins during a market correction.

• Applying KLR to cow-calf operations: Assessing whether to sell weaned calves or carry them forward, and using the tools to evaluate cull animals and breeding decisions.

• Building cash reserves: Preparing your business for market corrections and seasonal challenges.

• Putting learning into practice: How the KLR tools, 6-Week Sprint and Mastermind support graduates after the school.

The five KLR principles

1. Balance Grass, Money and Livestock.

2. Every day we sell and replace.

3. Know the price relationship between what you have to sell and what you can replace it with today.

4. Sell the overpriced; keep or buy the underpriced.

5. Know and understand yourself.

“Overpriced” and “underpriced” are specific to your business. Your feed, costs and available time determine whether an opportunity works for you.

A key takeaway

You cannot control the weather or market direction, but you can use today’s information to make better decisions.

As Mel explains, KLR is a decision-making process. It helps put integrity around your numbers so you can assess your options with greater confidence.

Upcoming KLR Marketing Schools in Canada

Grahame and Mel discuss plans to bring the 2½-day KLR Marketing School to:

• Olds, Alberta ~ 26 - 28 January, 2027
  To Register contact Kayla at comm@foothillsforage.com or 403-995-9466
  

• Brandon, Manitoba ~ 2 - 4 February, 2027
  Contact Duncan at Duncan@mfga.net
  

The school covers trading and breeding enterprises through practical calculations, discussion, role-playing and the interactive trading game, “Who Ate My Grass?”

Interested in attending? Contact the Canadian event organisers for school information and registration enquiries.

Listen in and discover how a clearer understanding of your Grass, Money and Livestock can help you recognise opportunities when conditions change.