SPAG021 · TRY TO GAME ITSPAG021 · TRY TO GAME ITHere is one pen of Nebraska feeder cattle. Pick a trick buyers can use on a seller today. Watch it work the old way. Then watch SPAG021 shut it down.
None of this is new law. The safeguards are written into how SPAG021 runs every sale, so a seller doesn't have to know the tricks to be protected from them.
The seller gets the best price any qualified buyer was willing to pay. Nobody had to be in the room, on the phone, or in the know.
Every qualified buyer bids on the same lot at the same time. Nobody sees who bid or what.
All bids open at once. The best price wins. There is no last look.
Each bid is fingerprinted before the sale and backed by a deposit. The terms can't change after the fact.
A partner fund can settle the winning bid for about two weeks, so a sale never falls through on a slow bank.
Where the numbers come from. Lot 024 is an example; its $390.66/cwt is the USDA-reported average for 650–700 lb steers at Huss Livestock, Kearney, Oct. 21, 2025 (cwt = hundredweight, 100 lb). Tricks 01 and 06: at Georgia feeder-cattle teleauctions, each additional buyer raised the price by $0.30/cwt on cattle averaging about $64/cwt, roughly 0.47% (Turner, Dykes & McKissick, Southern Journal of Agricultural Economics, 1991). Trick 01 assumes a sealed sale draws three more bidders than one phone offer; trick 06 assumes one bidder is shut out. Trick 02: rising buyer concentration at two large feeder auctions cut prices by up to $0.46/cwt when feeders sold for about $80/cwt, roughly 0.55% (Bailey, Brorsen & Fawson, Review of Agricultural Economics, 1993). For fed cattle, Iowa State's 2025 model puts packers' buying-power markdown at about $3.69/cwt, 2.6% of the price (Moschini & Smith, CARD 25-WP 673). Trick 05: a 2–4% "pencil shrink" is standard and agreed up front (University of Nebraska Extension); the trick is a further cut at delivery, and each extra point of shrink is 1% of the lot's value. Tricks 03 and 04: no study measures them, so we don't put a number on them. All percentages are applied to this lot to show scale; older studies are converted to a share of the price at the time. Real outcomes vary sale by sale. SPAG021 also keeps a twenty-one-auction track record for every buyer: it never changes the price a seller gets. It decides who gets first claim on financing, how large a deposit a buyer posts, and, when a lot is split among buyers, who gets the volume at the one clearing price.