Working Livestock Market
Oklahoma City (Stockyards City)
Oklahoma National Stockyards
The world's largest stocker and feeder cattle market - the last of the great terminal yards still running, with live auctions and the Stockyards City district.
Still selling cattle
Working livestock markets
While the great urban stockyards closed, the business of buying and selling cattle never stopped — it decentralized. Today's livestock markets are regional auction barns and, increasingly, video and internet auctions that move cattle from ranch to feedyard without a single animal setting foot in a downtown pen.
The Oklahoma National Stockyards in Oklahoma City is the great survivor: opened in 1910 and still the world's largest stocker and feeder cattle market, with live auctions every Monday and Tuesday. Joplin Regional Stockyards in Missouri and Bluegrass Stockyards in Kentucky are among the largest sale barns in the country, aggregating thousands of small producers' cattle into truckload lots. And Superior Livestock Auction pioneered a different model entirely — selling cattle by video since 1987, filmed on the ranch and sold to buyers bidding from anywhere.
These are America's working livestock markets: how they operate, how a sale works, and what makes each one distinct.
Working Livestock Market
Carthage, Missouri
Joplin Regional Stockyards
One of the largest cattle auction facilities in the country, aggregating the Ozarks' small herds into truckload lots at its Carthage sale barn.
Working Livestock Market
Lexington, Kentucky
Bluegrass Stockyards
The largest livestock market east of the Mississippi - rebuilt after a 2016 fire into a working stockyard with shops, dining, and a beef-education center.
Video Auction
National (Brush, Colorado)
Superior Livestock Auction
The pioneer of the video cattle auction (since 1987): cattle are filmed on the ranch and sold as load-lots to buyers bidding from anywhere.
How a cattle auction works. Cattle are consigned, weighed, and sorted, then sold live through a sale ring to order buyers and feedyard reps whose competitive bidding sets the price — a process the industry calls price discovery. Video auctions do the same thing remotely, selling truckload lots filmed on the ranch.