By: Stefan Ulrich

Steers are the gender of choice for feeding in a feedlot. This is reasonable considering that the steer’s only purpose is to be meat for someone’s table. Yet there are times when there are more heifers than the replacement market can use and so some are also fed in the feedlots.

There are four factors that influence the profitability between feeding heifers or steers, these factors are: daily gains, feed conversions, feeder prices, and the fed cattle prices (Williams, 2002, p. 1).

There is the potential of making up to $50.00 US more per head by feeding steers, yet this sometimes can also be true when feeding heifers (Williams, 2002, p. 1). However in 4 of the 6 articles researched steers consistently made more money than the heifers.

Steers include all animals from the poor ones to the best ones so they are better quality stock because the best heifers are kept as replacement animals and so just the poor ones go into feedlots to be fed. This means that they will not gain weight as well as the better animals would have gained had they also been placed into a feedlot. Feeding heifers means you are not starting with the best possible kind of animal to create the best profit.

It is a known fact that heifers do not gain weight as well as steers. Heifers can gain from 0.40 to 0.46 lbs per day less than steers (Williams, 2002, p.2). This also means that heifers do not convert the feed as well as steers. Heifers need to eat 0.35 to 0.50 lbs more feed than steers to create a pound of meat (Williams, 2002, p. 2). This means that it costs 6 to 8 cents (Canadian) per pound of gain more to feed a heifer than a steer (M. Stauffer, telephone conversation September 23, 2002). Steers are cheaper to feed and gain faster than heifers.

Since it costs more to feed the heifer, it is implied that to make the same profit as a steer, the heifer must be cheaper to buy. The heifers must be 10 to 12 cents per pound cheaper than steers otherwise it becomes expensive to feed heifers (M. Stauffer, telephone conversation September 23, 2002).

The price per pound for finished animals is almost the same for steers and heifers (Atkinson, 2002) and (Williams, 2002, p. 2). When selling a fed animal one will get very similar prices per pound for a steer or a heifer. This has not always been true and in the future many not continue to be the case. It is one change that could affect the profit difference between the genders so one needs to be aware of if it when it changes and make the appropriate adjustments when buying one’s cattle. If one were to consistently get more money for fed heifers than steers then one could also pay more when buying heifers.

Today the only way to make more money with feeding heifers instead of steers is to buy the heifers for 10 to 12 cents per pound less than what a person can buy the steers. If this is not possible than it will be more profitable to buy steers.