How to Read a Feedlot Close-Out (and Catch Problems Before the Next One)

A close-out is where feeding-period truth arrives, all at once, months after anyone could act on it. Learning to read one properly does two things: it tells you what happened to these cattle, and it builds the checklist of what to watch on the next pen while watching still matters.

Here's the line-by-line.

The weight lines

Pay weight in / out weight. Everything keys off these. Check the shrink assumptions — a 2% versus 4% pencil shrink on in-weight quietly moves every downstream number.

Days on feed. Compare against projection. Cattle that took 30 extra days to reach grade consumed 30 extra days of feed and yardage — often the whole margin.

Average daily gain (ADG). Total gain ÷ days on feed. Good finishing cattle commonly run 3.0–4.0 lb/day. Read it with days on feed: a flashy ADG over fewer days can simply mean cattle sold green; a modest ADG over long days means something dragged — health, weather, ration, or cattle that never fit the program.

The efficiency lines

Feed conversion (F:G). Dry matter consumed per pound gained — the single best measure of how the feeding actually went. If conversion is a point worse than comparable pens in your own history, something specific happened: a health run, ration transition trouble, mud, or bunk management. The close-out won't tell you which. Your in-season records will — if they exist.

Cost of gain. Total feeding costs ÷ pounds gained, the number that decides whether feeding added value. Split it mentally into feed COG and everything else (health, yardage, death loss, interest). Feed COG tracks markets; the rest tracks management.

The painful lines

Death loss. Industry death loss often runs 1–2%, but the average matters less than the pattern. Two percent spread randomly is risk; two percent clustered in the first 45 days is a receiving program problem — procurement, commingling, processing timing, or arrival health protocol.

Health costs and retreats. Total medicine cost per head, and if your records allow it, retreat rate — the share of treated cattle that needed a second pull. High retreats point at protocol or case-timing problems your vet should see.

Reading the whole page

The skill is reading lines together:

• Good ADG + bad conversion → cattle ate well but expensively; look at ration cost and waste
• Bad ADG + good conversion → intake was the limit; bunk management, weather, or health
• Good performance + red bottom line → the buy or the sell was wrong, not the feeding
• One pen wrecked, siblings fine → trace that pen's specific history: arrival date, source, first-week treatments

The real lesson of every close-out

Almost every ugly close-out contains a moment — usually in the first 60 days — when the problem was visible in the daily data. The pulls ticked up in week three. Conversion drifted in month two. Bunks were slick for ten straight mornings.

The close-out is only a surprise when nobody could see those signals in-season. That's the case for pen-level records captured as work happens: CattleOS ties feed deliveries, pulls, treatments, moves, and counts to the pen daily, so cost of gain and health trends are visible while there's still time to change the outcome — and the close-out becomes confirmation, not news.

Read the close-out. Then go build the system that makes the next one boring.