Cattle Market Weight Calculator

It runs a brute-force search rather than a formula: starting 50 lbs above the animal's current weight, it steps up in 10-lb increments to a ceiling of 1,600 lbs, computing projected feed cost and price-slide-adjusted revenue at every step, and keeps whichever weight produces the highest profit. Because it's a scan in fixed increments with a hard ceiling, the reported optimum is the best of the tested candidates, not a true continuous maximum, and it will never recommend a weight above 1,600 lbs regardless of your inputs.

Price slide is the standard feedlot practice of discounting the price per cwt as cattle get heavier, because heavier finished cattle tend to carry more fat and yield less desirable cutability per pound. In this calculator, for every 100 lbs the sale weight sits above the 1,300-lb reference weight, the market price is reduced by the price slide rate you enter — so a high price slide value can shrink or eliminate the profit advantage of pushing cattle to heavier weights.

The model assumes constant daily gain and constant feed cost per day across the entire feeding period, but real feed efficiency typically declines as cattle approach their finished weight — animals convert feed to gain less efficiently late in the feeding period than early on. Since this calculator doesn't model that decline, it can overstate how much additional weight is profitable to add, meaning the true optimal weight for a real animal may sit somewhat below the reported figure.

Daily gain sets how many days are needed to reach any candidate weight (additional pounds divided by daily gain), which directly drives total feed cost for every weight tested in the search. A daily gain entered too high understates the days and feed cost needed to reach a given weight, which can bias the search toward recommending a heavier — and less realistically profitable — sale weight than your cattle will actually achieve.