# The Drought Sale

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-believe-6610011/the-drought-sale
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-believe-6610011/the-drought-sale.md
Podcast: [I Believe](https://stenobird.com/podcast/i-believe-6610011)
Published: 2026-06-02T07:21:00+00:00
Episode link: https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-drought-sale
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/198329456/cc9c975bed9aaa98341d6beec7727fba.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/i-believe-6610011/episodes/the-drought-sale
Duration seconds: 1755

## Resource

A man selling good cows is not happy about it. Wednesday morning in May. He pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven. The sun is up but the cold has not gone. Winter is fighting summer. Some days in May might reach the 80s, some days snow. His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat. Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door. The lot is full. It should not be full. Wednesday is not a normal sale day in May. Today is a drought sale, and the trailers are lined up in rows he has not seen in this lot in years. Goosenecks and bumper-pulls. Plates from three states. Some of the trailers have cows in them with calves still wet at their sides. The market is so busy there aren’t enough pens to hold all the groups. The ranchers unload, and the cattle move straight through the alleys into the sale ring, then onto a different truck. A rancher does not haul a wet calf to a sale barn unless something is wrong. He kills the engine. Sits a moment. The check he is about to get is already in his head. The math is bad and the math is the math. Twenty-five head in the trailer. Cows he had not planned to sell for years. Good cows. Bred back. The snow and the grass didn’t come this winter and the hay he would need to carry them through summer is gone or priced past what the check from October will cover. Some years he might have been able to buy hay from Missouri and ship it, but fuel prices are way high because some strait on the other side of the world is closed, so that doesn’t pencil out. He has run the numbers a hundred times since April. There is no version where he gets to keep them and still make money. He steps down. The gravel crunches. Jesse, Bentley mark on her forehead, stays in the cab. The brand inspector is at his post off to the left of the buildi…

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## Transcript

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