Superior Livestock Auction

Overview

Superior Livestock Auction is not a physical stockyard. There is no barn where cattle are penned and paraded past buyers, and no local sale yard defines its territory -- its scope is national. Superior lists offices in Hudson Oaks, Texas; Brush, Colorado; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Eagle, Idaho, with historical roots centered in Brush and a longstanding presence tied to the Fort Worth Stockyards. It is the leading video and internet load-lot cattle auction company in the country, and since a May 2013 acquisition it has operated within the National Livestock family, alongside National Livestock Credit Corporation, an Oklahoma cattle-industry cooperative and lender founded in 1932.

In a recent year Superior marketed somewhere between roughly 1.9 million and more than 2 million head of cattle, a figure that varies year to year, drawing on more than 5,000 farmer and rancher consignors across the country. Individual sale events can themselves be enormous: one recent July sale moved approximately 223,767 head across 1,653 lots from 29 states, and a June sale in the same year moved roughly 65,922 head in 543 lots from 28 states -- representative of the scale a single multi-day video auction can reach.

How the Video Auction Was Born

Superior Livestock Auction was founded in 1987 by Jim Odle, a cattleman and auctioneer from Brush, Colorado, and Buddy Jeffers, an auctioneer with ties to the Amarillo Livestock Auction. The company's founding innovation was simple to describe and difficult to pull off at the time: instead of requiring producers to haul cattle to a physical barn to be sold, Superior began marketing cattle over satellite television, becoming the first company to do so.

That single change forever altered how load-lots of cattle -- truckload-sized groups of similar cattle, roughly a semi-load -- are marketed in the United States. A rancher no longer needed a stockyard within trucking distance to reach a competitive pool of buyers; a buyer no longer needed to travel to a sale barn to bid on cattle located hundreds or thousands of miles away. What began as a satellite broadcast has, over nearly four decades, evolved into an online-streamed auction, but the underlying model Odle and Jeffers pioneered in 1987 remains the foundation of the business.

How a Video Sale Works

A video sale unfolds in a sequence distinct from a ring auction. First, a Superior field representative visits the ranch in person, appraises the cattle, and records video of them along with a detailed written description covering weight, breed and type, weaning and vaccination history, feeding background, location, and a specific future delivery date or window. Second, those recorded lots are cataloged and broadcast during a scheduled multi-day auction event -- historically over satellite television, today streamed online -- where buyers across the country can review the video and description for each lot before it comes up for bid.

Third, buyers bid remotely, by phone or online, rather than sitting in a physical seat at a ring. Fourth, and most distinctively, the cattle are sold in truckload-sized load-lots and never leave the ranch for the sale itself; they ship only later, on the delivery date agreed at the time of sale, a practice known as forward contracting because the sale is agreed to well before physical delivery, sometimes weeks or months out. Because the cattle stay on the ranch until the agreed shipping date, this model reduces shrink -- the weight loss cattle experience from stress, hauling, and time off feed and water -- along with handling stress, disease exposure from commingling with unfamiliar cattle too early, and hauling costs that a traditional two-stop trip (ranch to stockyard, stockyard to buyer) would otherwise require.

Why It Matters to the Cattle Industry

The practical effect of the video-auction model is to detach a rancher's buyer pool from geography. A producer selling through a traditional physical stockyard reaches whichever buyers show up or bid in that market on that day; a producer selling through Superior's video platform reaches order buyers and feedyard representatives nationwide who are evaluating the same catalog simultaneously, regardless of where the cattle are actually standing. That expanded, national pool of bidders is what allows video sales to function as genuine price discovery for load-lot feeder and stocker cattle at a national, rather than merely regional, level.

Superior's scale -- multiple sale events a year, each covering tens or hundreds of thousands of head from dozens of states -- makes it one of the most closely watched sources of feeder-cattle pricing information in the industry, cited alongside physical terminal markets when analysts and lenders track where cattle prices are heading. Its historical and continuing ties to the Fort Worth Stockyards, recognized on the Texas Trail of Fame, connect the video-auction model back to the physical stockyard tradition it grew out of and, in the load-lot cattle trade, substantially supplemented.

For Producers and Buyers

For a producer, selling through Superior means having cattle appraised and marketed without ever loading a truck for the sale itself, reaching a national pool of bidders, and locking in a sale price weeks or months before the cattle actually have to ship -- useful for planning weaning, vaccination protocols, and pasture or feed logistics around a known delivery date rather than an open-ended one.

For a buyer, particularly an order buyer sourcing cattle for a feedyard, the draw is the ability to review detailed, standardized descriptions and video of load-lots from ranches across dozens of states in a single multi-day event, and to bid competitively without traveling to a physical sale barn. That combination of national reach, forward-contracted delivery, and detailed lot documentation is what has kept the video-auction model, and Superior specifically, central to how load-lot feeder and stocker cattle move through the American beef supply chain.

Frequently Asked Questions