Jessica Parker
Jr Staff Accountant

Jessica Parker


Jessica Parker brings over 15 years of bookkeeping and controller experience to the team. As a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, she specializes in lifting the daily accounting burden off the shoulders of business owners, giving them peace of mind and freedom to focus on their true passions.

Born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, Jessica’s roots in the agricultural community run deep. Outside of the accounting world, livestock has always been a cornerstone of her life—serving as both a rewarding family venture and a welcome break from the numbers. Alongside her husband, Pat, and their children, Jessica’s family owns and operates Parker Show Pigs. Together, they manage over 20 sows across two farrowing seasons, providing competitive show pigs to youth nationwide, while also raising beef for direct-to-consumer sales.

Jessica is thrilled to be a part of the Ranch Right team, where she can seamlessly combine her two lifelong passions: accounting and agriculture.

jr staff accountant at ranch right
Jr Staff Accountant

Megan Freeman


Megan grew up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Although she was not raised in agriculture, she has always had a passion for the industry. She graduated from the University of Idaho with a bachelor's degree in Animal Science, where she also met her husband, Sam.

Throughout her career, Megan has held a variety of positions, from working with JBS Meat Packers to her most recent role with Farm Credit. During her time in agricultural lending, she has worked with a wide range of businesses and gained valuable insight into one of the most important factors in business success: understanding the numbers.

In 2019, Megan and Sam purchased their own property and began raising Red Angus cattle. Through managing the finances of their own operation while also working in agricultural lending, Megan has developed a unique perspective that combines both the producer's and lender's viewpoints. This experience allows her to understand the challenges and opportunities faced by agricultural businesses from multiple angles and helps her provide practical, informed guidance to those she serves.

jentrie jr staff accountant at ranch right
Jr Staff Accountant

Jentrie Kartak

My name is Jentrie Kartak and I live in south central South Dakota on my husband’s family ranch. We run a fairly diverse operation with a commercial cow/calf herd, backgrounding lot, small band of broodmares, and a commercial meat goat herd. In our free time we enjoy wrangling our 2 year old as well!
 
My passion for agriculture started from a young age as I began riding horses before I could walk and helping out wherever I was needed on my family’s ranch. I grew up on a cow/calf operation in the Nebraska Sandhills just south of Bassett. This is where I developed a work ethic, learned responsibility, and grew a respect for the land and the cycle of life. At 15 years old, my family purchased part of the Bassett Livestock Auction, and I began learning about the industry from a different angle: understanding the ever-changing markets, buyer/seller relations, and how to sort and market cattle to keep operations profitable and spark competitive bidding. College led me to the business and numbers side where I received a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a minor in accounting. From there I worked on the program side of the Farm Service Agency, implementing many disaster relief programs through the floods and blizzards that prevailed in the winter of 2018-2019 and working through the pandemic that shut our world down in 2020. In 2021 I was offered the opportunity to work as a lender at a local bank in my hometown. This experience really helped shape my knowledge on the numbers side of agriculture and provided me with many real life examples of what makes an operation successful.
 
I look forward to carrying the knowledge that I have gained from past experiences into this new role where I can continue to work for and give back to an industry that has given so much to me.

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Ranch Right Annual Conference

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Executive Assistant

Kylin Jerslid

Kylin was raised on her family’s ranch north of Springview, NE. Her passion for anything ranching, cattle, and horses began early! Growing up in a family that values learning developed a love for learning and growth in her.

Kylin graduated from Chadron State College in 2021 with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and a minor in Ag- Business. After graduation, she moved home to ranch full time with her parents, Brian and Jill Munger, helping with their registered seed stock herd, stocker cattle, custom grazing, and bull development, along with the occasional sheep, goat, chicken, game bird, or pig project!

In May of 2024, Kylin married Drew and moved south of Chadron, NE to ranch with her husband and his family. In her free time, you can find her working with her husband on the ranch, riding her horses, hunting, quilting, or reading a book!

Sales

mimi Argyle

Mimi Argyle grew up in Idaho immersed in agriculture, specifically cow/calf enterprises. Mimi and her husband Tyson run a cow/calf operation in Wyoming and are partners in Mimi’s family’s operation in Idaho. This gives her a diverse understanding of ranching.
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Mimi graduated college with a Master’s in Education from Montana State University and continues to use her gift by teaching High School Science and Ag Business management in Idaho. She has a knack for numbers and is a lifelong learner always trying to improve management practices through facts not feelings.

​In her spare time, Mimi enjoys spending time with Tyson and their 2 daughters, Macki and Ruby, and training barrel horses.

Founder

John Haskell

John Haskell founded Ranch Right, and he came to ranching from the outside. He didn't grow up on one. He hired on at a ranch that was making good money, saw how it ran, and never looked at the business the same way again. Over the next twenty years he worked for profitable ranches, including Deseret Land and Livestock, built ranch businesses from the ground up, and turned failing ones around.

His background is an unusual one for an accountant. He studied Range Science and Management at Utah State University, doing graduate research alongside Mark Ritchie and Fred Provenza, and earned a degree in Biology and Math, summa cum laude, from the University of New Mexico. His ecological research has been published in Nature and The American Naturalist. That mix of hard science and hands-on ranch work is how he learned to see a ranch as one system, where the land and the books either work together or fail together.

Today John runs Ranch Right's advisory side with Travis Krause, helping ranchers make the operational calls that close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. He hosts Ranchonomics, a podcast on the business of ranching, and is a founding member of Ranching.fyi.

He believes great ranches focus on the business and use its power to get the outcomes they're after.

jaynee, CPA at Ranch Right
Tax Prep & Planning Advisor

Jaynee Hanson, CPA

Professional Expertise
Jaynee is a Certified Public Accountant specializing in taxation for agricultural producers and small businesses. She advises clients on federal and state tax matters, including entity selection, depreciation strategies, tax deferrals, succession planning, and proactive tax optimization. Jaynee began her career in Casper, Wyoming, where she built a strong foundation working with ranching operations and businesses in the oil and gas industry. She later moved to Laramie where she truly became a “small business generalist,” gaining experience in payroll, retirement compliance and software implementation. Most recently, she has worked for a nationwide boutique firm specializing in entity structure and tax-saving strategies. She helps clients make informed decisions that minimize tax exposure and support long-term, multi-generational success.

Agricultural Perspective
Jaynee brings practical, firsthand experience to her work. She and her family own and operate a Wyoming ranch, giving her a deep understanding of the financial and operational challenges producers face every day. She graduated from Ranching for Profit in 2014, further strengthening her knowledge of business management and strategic decision-making in agriculture. She is especially passionate about helping families preserve and strengthen multi-generational agricultural operations through strategic planning, clear communication, and client education that empowers confident decision-making. She believes agriculture offers tremendous opportunities for thoughtful tax planning and business strategy, and she enjoys helping producers take advantage of them. There’s no better industry to be in!

Education & Life Outside the Office
Jaynee graduated from the University of Wyoming in 2015 and earned her CPA license in 2020. Outside the office, she and her husband are raising their two young sons. She also enjoys caring for her chickens, tending her garden, and continually improving her canning skills.

Micayla Giffin, Ranch Right Farm & Ranch Financial Advisor
Financial Literacy Advisor

micayla giffin

Micayla Giffin is Ranch Right's financial literacy advisor. She grew up on a small farm in southeast Missouri and earned a degree in agriculture from the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Before joining the team, she spent nine years with the USDA Farm Service Agency as a loan officer, loan analyst, and support specialist, working with farms and ranches of every kind. She watched some fail, plenty just get by, and a few build something that lasts.

That last group is the work she does here. Micayla helps ranchers set goals, build a budget, and do the math on the gap between the profit they're making now and the profit they're after. She defines the target and the number, and the team handles the moves to get there.

She lives in Union City, Tennessee with her husband Derek and their two sons, where they grow corn, soybeans, and cover crops and graze cattle on perennial pasture. She has been a guest on the podcast on financial literacy and on navigating FSA programs.

listen to Micayla on the Ranchonomics Podcast
Walter Lynn Jr CPA
Succession & Restructuring Advisor

Walter Lynn Jr., CPA

Walter Lynn Jr. is a CPA and Ranch Right's succession and restructuring advisor. He grew up on a diversified family farm in central Illinois with a land ethic that has shaped his whole career. He went on to own a CPA firm serving agricultural clients across the country, and he has long been a conservation leader and an advocate for regenerative agriculture.
He served as the initial chief operating officer of Understanding Ag and later as CFO for both Understanding Ag and the Soil Health Academy. When ranchers need to restructure debt, plan a handoff to the next generation, or rebuild working capital, Walter is who they sit down with.
He was an early influence on John's own thinking about ranch accounting, and he joined the podcast to talk through how ranchers build working capital.

listen to walter on the Ranchonomics Podcast
Julie Davidson
Insurance Policy Advisor

Julie Davidson

Julie Davidson is Ranch Right's insurance advisor and runs High Country Coverage Consulting out of Sheridan, Wyoming. She grew up on a small hay farm in southwest Iowa raising and showing Quarter Horses, and has spent most of her adult life in Wyoming at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Early in her marriage, her husband worked as farm crew foreman on one of the state's largest ranches, so she has seen ranch risk up close from the start.

She is a licensed insurance producer in several states, specializes in farm and ranch coverage, and has more than twenty years in the industry, including claims adjusting. She holds an Associate in Claims designation from the Insurance Institute of America and studied business administration at Sheridan College and Regis University. On top of that, she manages the books for a large cow/calf operation and helps run its direct-to-consumer grass-fed, grain-finished beef program.

When a rancher needs to know what they're covered for and what they're not, Julie is who answers it. She is a regular on the podcast, covering everything from insurance pitfalls to health coverage to trucking risk in a high-price market.

listen to julie on the Ranchonomics Podcast
Emilie Hopson, Fractional Farm HR Advisor
HR Advisor & Founder of Agri-Culture

Emilie Hopson

Emilie Hopson is Ranch Right's HR advisor and the founder of Agri-Culture, a business built around the people side of ranching. She has more than twelve years of human resources experience in the medical and manufacturing fields, holds a degree in business administration and marketing from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, and earned an MBA from Texas A&M University-Commerce.

Ranching is not a side interest for her. She and her husband Zach run a 400-head cow-calf operation in Nacogdoches, Texas, while raising three children, and she is a graduate of Ranching for Profit. That combination is rare: someone who understands payroll, hiring, and team systems and has also built a crew on a working ranch.

Emilie helps ranchers build stronger teams, set up better systems, and work through the how-do-we-fix-this moments that come with managing people. She joined the podcast to talk about the work she does through Agri-Culture.

listen to Emilie on the Ranchonomics Podcast
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Account Manager

Mandy Wiltse

Mandy Wiltse started out a city girl in Topeka, Kansas. She earned a BBA in accounting from Kansas State University in 1997, where she also met her husband Kevin. After they married she moved to his family's fifth-generation ranch and farm near Timken, Kansas, and that is where the two of them raised three children.

She brings more than twenty-five years of accounting experience to Ranch Right, spanning work at a CPA firm, teaching at a community college, and running virtual accounting services. As an account manager, that range lets her meet clients wherever they are with their books.

Mandy and Kevin are both graduates of Ranching for Profit and are serious about regenerative agriculture and soil health. They run a cow/calf herd and a direct-to-consumer grass-finished beef program, and farm wheat, soybeans, and milo. So when a client talks through the operation side of things, she has lived a good deal of it.

Onboarding / Staff Accountant

Chelsey Waters


Chelsey Waters grew up on a cow/calf and backgrounding operation in southern Alberta. She earned a Bachelor of Business Administration with an accounting major from Mount Royal University, then earned her Chartered Professional Accountant designation while working with agriculture clients.

In 2020 she and her husband Jordie moved to Texas to put their stockmanship and livestock marketing experience to work, and she joined Ranch Right in 2021. She handles onboarding and staff accounting, so for a lot of clients she is one of the first people on the team they work with as they get set up.

She has a real appetite for learning, and lately that has meant digging into how different kinds of people think and work. That comes in handy in a job that is part numbers and part getting to know the operation behind them.

daniel strong, CPA
Senior Accountant

Daniel Strong, CPA

Daniel Strong was born and raised in Mitchell, in southeast South Dakota. He grew up wishing he had been raised on a farm. His grandparents had sold the family place during the farm crisis of the 1980s, so agriculture was close but not underfoot. He earned an economics degree from the University of South Dakota and went on to finish a Master's in Accounting.

After college he taught English abroad and spent time living outside the country, which left him with a deep appreciation for the American form of government and the rule of law. He came back, went to work at a rural CPA firm that dealt heavily with local farmers and ranchers, and earned his CPA in South Dakota.

As a senior accountant at Ranch Right, Daniel likes the part of the work where he sits down with clients and hands them information they can use while it still matters. Timely and useful is the goal.

Staff Accountant

Jori Steele

Jori Steele grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, with ranching on both sides of her family. Her family ran cow-calf and custom grazing yearling operations in high-elevation country, so she grew up understanding what that kind of terrain asks of an operation. She earned an Animal Science degree from the University of Wyoming.

From there she and her husband Jordan moved to northwest Kansas and spent time in academia. For five years she was the Beef Program Director at Colby Community College, where she taught beef management, looked after the college cow herd, and ran the performance bull test and sale. Working with students, she kept noticing the same gap: they needed financial awareness and organizational skills more than almost anything. That pushed her toward the accounting side, and she finished a Master's in Agricultural Education in the summer of 2023.

She now works as a staff accountant at Ranch Right and lives in Wheatland, Wyoming, with Jordan and their son Roan. When she is not at the desk, she is roping, hunting, or doing day work for local ranches.

Staff Accountant

Josie Hammond

Josie Hammond is a fifth-generation rancher from a cow/calf ranch near Hardin, Montana. She graduated from Montana State University in May 2022 with a degree in Agricultural Business and a minor in accounting.

As a staff accountant at Ranch Right, she works with the kind of operations she was raised on. Home is still a big part of her life, and she spends as much time as she can helping on the ranch alongside her dad, mom, brother, and grandpa.

Away from work and the ranch, Josie bakes, quilts, plays with her nephews, and keeps her dog Paisley company.

Staff Accountant

Kohl Carter

Kohl Carter grew up hiking and exploring the mountains and canyons of Utah. His path into ranching ran through the soil. He got interested while studying soil science in college, and an internship with Missouri grazier Greg Judy gave him his first hands-on introduction to cattle, sheep, and grazing management.

From there he worked on ranches across the country and saw a lot of different production models. He has also completed training through the Savory Institute, the Soil Food Web School, and Ranching for Profit School. As a staff accountant at Ranch Right, that grounding in how ranches run shows up in the way he reads an operation's numbers.

Kohl lives in central Louisiana, where he manages a small cattle operation with his family. He is happiest when he is learning something new.

Jr. Staff Accountant

Kailee Butterfield

Kailee Butterfield grew up in an eastern Nebraska farming community, in corn and soybean country. She fell for ranching during summers on her grandparents' place in the Sandhills, and it stuck. She graduated from Chadron State College with a BBA in Rangeland Management, Livestock option, and a minor in agribusiness.

Before joining Ranch Right as a junior staff accountant, she spent four years as a program analyst at the Farm Service Agency. That FSA background gives her a working knowledge of the federal programs a lot of ranchers are trying to make sense of.

Kailee lives south of Chadron, Nebraska, with her husband Buck, where they run a few cows and are building a ranching operation of their own. She rides and shows horses, follows western art, does ranch work, and keeps a flock of chickens. She joined Micayla Giffin on the podcast to walk through FSA programs and how ranchers can use them.

listen to Kailee on the Ranchonomics Podcast
Brianna Lopez, Farm Payroll Specialist at Ranch Right
Payroll Specialist

Brianna Lopez

Brianna Lopez was raised on her family's ranch in New Mexico and has deep roots in agriculture. Since 2013 she and her husband, a full-time cowboy, have raised three daughters in that same lifestyle. Today they live in northern Nevada on the historic T S Ranch.

She came to bookkeeping early, first doing the books for her own small businesses and later managing the office and accounting for a local feed store. She is QuickBooks-certified, and as Ranch Right's payroll specialist she handles transaction cleanup, account reconciliation, payroll processing, and the day-to-day bookkeeping. Her focus is helping ranchers, farmers, and small business owners get a handle on their finances without feeling buried by them.

Off the clock, Brianna reads and rides horses.

Staff Accountant

Andrew Mainini

Andrew Mainini is from the Texas Hill Country. He graduated from Oklahoma State University with a BBA in Rangeland Management and Agribusiness.

He and his wife Tori have worked on ranches across the country, from the Texas Panhandle to northern Wyoming, and that road has taken him through seedstock operations, large-scale corporate ranches, and feedlots. What he cares about most is the place where modern regenerative management meets a more traditional style of ranching. As a junior staff accountant at Ranch Right, he brings that on-the-ground perspective to the books.

Andrew lives in Bighorn, Wyoming, with Tori and their son Walt. When he is off the clock you might find him golfing, fly fishing in the Bighorn Mountains, or working with cow horses.

Staff Accountant

Kecia Roseman

Kecia Roseman lives in western North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with her husband. She raised five daughters and a son, and these days she has three grandchildren.

She brings thirty years of accounting experience to Ranch Right. Over that time she has done CPA services, non-profit auditing and bookkeeping, personal tax prep, and controller work for family-owned small businesses. As a staff accountant, what drives her is helping clients understand their own financials, because that is what lets them make sound decisions and hold on to a reasonable work-life balance.

Jr. Staff Accountant

Concey Storer

Concey Storer is from central Nebraska, where her family runs a feedlot, cow/calf, and farming operation in Palmer. She grew up around many sectors of the cattle industry, from birth to butcher. She attended Chadron State College and earned a BBA in Ag-Business with a minor in art.

Her interest in cattle took her a long way from home for a while. She traveled to Australia to learn about the industry there, attending conferences and workshops while working on commercial cow/calf operations. As a junior staff accountant at Ranch Right, that broad view of how cattle outfits operate helps her make sense of the numbers behind them.

In November 2025 she married Colten Storer and moved to his family's ranch in Arthur, Nebraska. You will usually catch her working with colts, helping her husband on the ranch, or running a farm stand.

Jr. Staff Accountant

Caitie Hefner

Caitie Hefner comes from a southern New Mexico cattle ranching family. After high school she managed the office at her father's dental practice, where she built a solid foundation in business management, and she also helped with operations and bookkeeping in his cattle ranching business. She holds a bachelor's degree in general business.

For a while she pursued music, working as a singer/songwriter in the Texas country scene in Austin. In 2013 she came back to her ag roots, taking a job at a high-end guest and working cattle ranch in southern Wyoming. There she ran a large equestrian program and handled bookkeeping, accounting, and horse health and behavior. She also met her husband there, and the two of them are rooted in rural Wyoming.

As a junior staff accountant at Ranch Right, Caitie draws on both the books side and the ranch side of that experience. When she is not working, she plays music, barrel races, hunts, and works with her horses.

ranch right farm consulting lead Travis Krause
Advisory Team Lead

Travis Krause

Travis Krause leads Ranch Right's advisory team. He grew up near D'Hanis, Texas, on land his family has ranched since 1846, and studied Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M. His work has taken him from India to Central Africa and back home to the Texas Hill Country.

He co-founded Parker Creek Ranch, a direct-to-consumer meat business, with his wife Mandy. He served as CEO of GrazingLands, managing ranch assets for SoilWorks Natural Capital, and later as VP of Highland Beef, running supply chain logistics. He has also worked as a venture partner helping build new companies.

On the advisory team, Travis works with John on the how: grazing, gross margin, marketing, and the operational moves that turn a plan into profit. He joined John on the podcast to break down the link between grazing management and gross product.

listen to Travis on the Ranchonomics Podcast

How to Track Cattle Inventory (Without the Headache)

John Haskell
In This Guide:
  1. Lessons From The Ranchonomics Podcast Episode 72
how to track cattle inventory banner image

How to Track Cattle Inventory: The Most Undervalued Skill in Ranching

Lessons From The Ranchonomics Podcast Episode 72

If you want to manage your ranch like an asset instead of just an operation, the first thing you have to do is know what you own. That sounds obvious. It isn’t. I talk to ranchers all the time who can’t tell me how many ten-year-old cows they’re running, or what their stockers weigh today. Most of them have never been shown how to track cattle inventory in a way that actually holds up day to day. And without that, every buy and sell decision is a guess.

So let me walk you through how to track cattle inventory the way I’ve learned to do it: simply, cheaply, and in a way that lets you make a marketing decision at a glance. This is for cow-calf producers and stocker operators who want to sell the overvalued and buy the undervalued, but keep getting stuck because they don’t actually know what’s in their herd.

Key Takeaways

  • Knowing what you own is the foundation of asset management. You can’t trade well if you can’t identify the segments of your inventory.
  • Age is the single most important axis for breeding stock. A ten-year-old cow and a four-year-old cow are not worth the same, on the market or in your operation.
  • Color-coded ear clips beat reading tag numbers in the mud. Sort by what you can see from the front of the ear.
  • For stockers, track weight, either on a scale or with a running estimate built off purchase weight and daily gain.
  • Learning how to track cattle inventory doesn’t require fancy software. A notebook, a chute day, and a few color-coded clips will get you most of the way there.

Why Knowing What You Own Comes First

When we talk about sell-buy marketing, what we’re really doing is moving money out of overvalued assets and into undervalued ones. That only works if your operation can feed you the information to make those trades. Otherwise you’re flying blind, with no real grip on how to track cattle inventory in the first place.

The goal is to convert from an operations-first mindset to an asset-management mindset, and then let that asset-management thinking guide your operations back the other way. That inventory you’re sitting on, especially in this year’s market, is worth a lot of money. Manage it carefully and you can meaningfully improve your returns. It’s exactly why learning how to track cattle inventory matters more than any other skill in sell-buy marketing, since everything else depends on getting it right first.

So the question becomes practical: how do you capture what you own in as much detail as possible, with as little work as possible? Here’s how to track cattle inventory for both sides of the herd, cows and stockers, without adding hours to your week.

How to Track Cattle Inventory in Your Cow Herd

For breeding stock, start with age, because that’s where how to track cattle inventory pays off the most for the least effort. I’d love more people to understand the age breakdown within their herd. Preg-checking season is the perfect time: if you’re working spring-calving cows in October, November, or December, have somebody record ages right there. Get them to year of birth if you can. If you can’t, get them to short-solids, broken-mouth, solid-mouth, young cows. That alone tells you whether you’ve got a load of seven-year-olds or twelve four-year-olds you could market if they were the overpriced class.

While you’ve got them in the chute, capture the other parameters that matter: pregnancy status, early versus late calvers, spring versus fall, open versus bred.

Then comes the part that makes tracking actually usable: marking. Years ago, through my friend Ben Bailey at the Rex Ranch (who got it from Burt Teichert), I was shown the Temple Tag clip, and I’m a big fan. It’s a small plastic clip with a rounded leading edge that punches into the front of the ear. It comes in a bunch of colors and it’s hard for a dog or a fence to pull out.

Here’s the system I recommend. Think of every cow as being on a path off the ranch, some short, some long, and let the color tell you which:

  • Red clip: this cow is leaving. She’s a cull. Maybe she’s still raising a calf but something’s wrong with her.
  • Yellow clip: one strike left. Run a yellow cow through this fall, find a bad bag or a cancer eye, and you just pop the yellow and put in a red. Now you know where she’s going on the next load.
  • Blue clip: old cows, or whatever you want to flag. The colors don’t matter; consistency does.
  • No clip: cows that are just right.

The beauty of this part of how to track cattle inventory is I never have to read a tag number again. When I’m sorting in the alley, I can see that clip from the front of the ear, even when there’s mud and manure all over everything. If I need to destock quickly, the reds go first, the yellows second. No bringing cows in, no squinting at five-digit numbers, no complicated decisions.

I still like a year brand or a single-digit dangle tag to mark birth year, because the first digit plus a color gives me everything. What I want to get people away from is needing to read a whole three- or five-digit number just to learn one thing about a cow. If that’s your system, you’ve got a problem, and it’s a sign you haven’t really nailed down how to track cattle inventory yet.

Usually it comes down to three to five groups that are economically important: age, bad bags, persistent lameness, poor doers, early or late breds, opens. Focus there. That short list is really the whole answer to how to track cattle inventory for cows: a handful of traits, tracked consistently, beats a complicated system nobody keeps up with.

How to Track Cattle Inventory for Stockers

I’m always amazed by stocker operators who have no idea what their cattle weigh. The cleanest answer is a scale, and I highly recommend weighing stockers with some regularity so you know how they’re doing. On the stocker side, how to track cattle inventory really comes down to one number: weight.

If you can’t weigh often, run an estimate. Say you bought calves at 475 pounds on November 1. If you figure they’re gaining a pound and a half a day and it’s been 60 days, that’s 475 plus 90, so about 565 pounds today. You have to check that number (they’re not gaining exactly the same every day), but build an average over time for your feed base, your weather, and your class of calf, and you’ll have a very good handle on what you own.

One more management note: don’t be afraid to stop and sort partway through winter. If some cows aren’t keeping up with a big group, sort them out, mark them, and feed them separately so they stay in condition and stay marketable. I’m not a fan of running cows down hard to “select genetics.” I want a low-input cow, but I also want to capture as much value as possible from every cow I own, including the ones that might do better on somebody else’s place east, south, or downhill. That kind of mid-season sorting is part of how to track cattle inventory too, not just the numbers on paper but the condition standing behind them.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you track cattle inventory simply? Capture the few traits that drive marketing decisions (age, pregnancy status, and condition for cows; weight for stockers) and mark animals with color-coded ear clips so you can read their status from the front of the ear at a glance. That’s how to track cattle inventory with maximum useful detail and minimum work.

When is the best time to record cow ages? Preg-checking season. If you’re working spring-calving cows in the fall, have someone record ages as they come through the chute, by year of birth if possible, or by mouthing them into short-solids, broken-mouth, and solid-mouth groups.

Why use color clips instead of numbered tags? Because you can see a color from the front of the ear even when tags are caked in mud, and you don’t have to read a long number to know a cow’s status. Reds leave first, yellows second: fast sorting with no guesswork.

How do I estimate stocker weight without a scale? Start from purchase weight, multiply your estimated daily gain by days on feed, and add it to the starting weight. Refine the gain estimate over time against your conditions, and spot-check on a scale when you can.

What’s the fastest way to get started? Pick your next chute day, whether that’s preg-checking cows or a scale day for stockers, and start capturing one trait at a time. Learning how to track cattle inventory is more habit than system, so consistency beats a fancy setup every time.

The Bottom Line

Learning how to track cattle inventory is, to my mind, the most undervalued skill in ranching, and it’s the thing that separates ranchers who manage their assets from those who just react to them. Get age, status, and weight in front of you at a glance, and your buy and sell decisions get faster, calmer, and far more profitable. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: figure out how to track cattle inventory before you worry about anything else in your marketing plan.

If you want to keep sharpening the business side of your operation, our Ranch Right webinars cover the financial fundamentals and business strategy, all taught by our own ranching and finance team.

More From the Sell/Buy Marketing Series

This article draws on Episode 72 of the Ranchonomics Podcast, a solo recording with host John Haskell.

John Haskell is the founder of Ranch Right, LLC, host of the Ranchonomics podcast, and a founding member of Ranching.fyi. For more than 20 years he has built, bought, and turned around profitable ranches across the U.S. and Canada. His focus is the business side of ranching - cattle trading, sell/buy marketing strategy, and the financial decisions that separate ranches that struggle from ranches that build wealth.

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