Market Overview

Montana produces roughly 1.24 million calves a year, the 13th-largest calf crop of any state. Those cattle reach buyers through three channels: public auction, video/satellite auction, and private treaty (direct negotiation with no sale event at all). Only the auction channel reports daily prices to USDA, so it does almost all of the public price discovery even though it carries the smallest share of the volume.

In plain terms: for every calf sold at a Montana sale barn, roughly five more move through a video sale or a direct deal that never generates a public price. See how these shares are calculated below.

How These Estimates Are Built

No agency publishes a channel-by-channel breakdown of Montana cattle marketing, so Honest Cattle derives one with a subtraction method:

Industry survey data (Montana Stockgrowers Association, academic research) then splits that remainder between video and private treaty.

Sources: USDA NASS Montana Cattle Inventory (Jan 2024); USDA AMS Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary #1778 (2024 aggregate, 165,607 hd); Superior Livestock and Cattle USA/DVAuction Montana sale announcements (2023–2024) for the video estimate. Private treaty is the residual of the other two. These are estimates, not official data — see Limitations.

Public Auctions

What it is: in-person bidding at a licensed livestock auction barn. Typical sellers: small-to-mid ranchers (50–200 hd), dispersal sales, culled breeding stock, mixed or uncommon lots. Advantages: price discovery, same-day payment, no marketing cost. Disadvantages: commingling risk, higher shrink (3–5% pencil shrink at the barn vs. 2–3% ranch-direct), and handling stress. Auctions often net lower prices than video or private treaty for comparable cattle, but most of that gap traces to lot size, uniformity, and health programs rather than the channel itself — on a quality-adjusted basis the true channel discount is smaller than conventional wisdom suggests.

The Billings complex — Public Auction Yards (PAYS) and Billings Livestock Commission (BLS) — is the dominant price-discovery point, together handling roughly 20,000 head in January alone. PAYS sells Wednesdays (all-class) and Fridays (feeder specials, seasonal, reported as AMS 1774 and 1776); BLS sells Mondays and Thursdays (AMS 1775 and 1777). Both run marquee Feeder Specials from fall through late February, then shift to all-class and cow-calf formats for summer. Miles City Livestock Commission, 150 miles east, runs Tuesday sales year-round (AMS 1773) and is the closer price point for Custer, Rosebud, Powder River, Carter, and Garfield County producers. All three roll up into the statewide Weekly Livestock Auction Summary (AMS 1778) — the best single-report snapshot of Montana’s public auction market. Full report links are in the USDA reference table below.

For the full multi-year price and volume record — feeder prices by weight class, cull-cow and bull prices, bred-cattle records, and sale-by-sale commentary, refreshed weekly as new AMS reports post — see Montana Cattle Auction Trends, 2023–2026.

Regional Markets

Smaller barns fill in the rest of the state: Montana Livestock Auction in Dillon (Beaverhead, Madison, Silver Bow), Headwaters Livestock Auction near Three Forks (Gallatin, Broadwater, Jefferson), Glasgow Stockyards (Valley, Phillips, northeastern Montana), and Glendive Livestock Exchange (Dawson, Wibaux, the eastern border counties). None has its own USDA AMS report — when their results appear at all, they’re folded into the AMS 1778 statewide composite rather than broken out. Billings generally sets the ceiling on Montana feeder prices through sheer buyer-pool size; regional barns typically trade at a modest discount but offer lower freight, less shrink, and the ability to sell smaller lots without a Billings-style sort.

Sources for advantages/disadvantages above: shrink schedules — Coffey et al., Iowa Beef Center / Univ. of Kentucky Extension; commingling and BRD morbidity — Step et al., J. Anim. Sci. 2008; video-vs-auction price comparisons — Schroeder, Mintert, Brazle & Grunewald (Kansas State, 1988), Bailey & Peterson (Utah State, 1991), KSU Extension MF-3325. None of these studies are Montana-specific; a Montana-specific comparison is planned once brand-inspection data can be paired with AMS 1778 prices.

Video & Satellite Auctions

What it is: cattle sold by video or online bidding while remaining on the ranch until sale. Typical sellers: mid-to-large ranchers with reputation, preconditioned load lots of 40–50+ head. Advantages: premium pricing (typically $5–15/cwt over public auction), no shipping stress before the sale, a national buyer pool. Disadvantages: marketing fees (3–5%), strict health-program requirements, delayed payment. Track every Montana-origin lot on Honest Cattle’s Montana Video Cattle Auction Results page.

Northern Livestock Video Auction (NLVA) — Billings, MT

Montana’s home video auction, with a four-sale summer series (June–September) reported by USDA under AMS 2772. The Summertime Classic in July is consistently the largest video sale in the region.

As of August 25, 2026: the Summertime Classic ran July 20–21 per posted NLVA results (167,000+ hd the prior year). The Early Summer Special has likely already run; Early Fall Preview and Fall Premier dates remain estimates from the 2023–2025 pattern. Confirm at northernlivestockvideo.com or 1-866-616-5035.

Western Video Market (WVM) — Cottonwood, CA

The largest video auction company in the western U.S. (13 annual sales, also broadcast on Dish Network 998; reported under AMS 3242). Its North Central region (MT, WY, ND, SD, NE, CO) is a regular Montana supply area.

WVM also runs production sales closer to Montana territory at the Irma Hotel in Cody, WY and the James Kjerstad Event Center in Rapid City, SD. Full schedule and rep contacts: wvmcattle.com/sale_schedule.

Superior Livestock Auction — Hudson Oaks, TX (National)

The nation’s largest video auction company, selling roughly every two to three weeks year-round (reported under AMS 2713). Montana falls in its North Central supply region alongside WY, ND, SD, NE, and CO; an example sale in April 2026 moved 23,954 head from 17 states, and its Great Plains Classic that February moved 49,358 head. Superior runs continuously rather than on a fixed seasonal calendar — see superiorlivestock.com/auctions or call 800-422-2117 for the current schedule.

Which Channel for Which Cattle?

Video suits large, uniform, well-described lots — 45+ head of similar weight, breed, and health program bring the strongest bids because buyers can commit sight-unseen. Smaller or mixed lots generally do better at live auction, where buyers can inspect and sort in person. Eastern and central Montana’s big ranch operations (Custer, Rosebud, Garfield, Musselshell, Fergus counties) are well suited to video: they produce uniform load lots and are often far from auction infrastructure.

Private Treaty / Direct Sales

What it is: direct negotiation between producer and buyer — feedlot, order buyer, or backgrounder — with no auction or video event at all. It is the largest channel and the least visible one: no clearinghouse, no daily report, no requirement to disclose terms. It covers several transaction types:

• Ranch-direct to feedlot — uniform load lots (often 500+ hd) sold to a Corn Belt or PNW feeder under a standing buyer relationship, freight handled by the buyer.
• Order buyers — independent buyers assembling truckload lots from multiple ranches for a feedlot client; common in eastern Montana (Custer, Carter, Powder River, Garfield).
• Retained ownership — a cow-calf producer ships cattle to a custom feedyard and keeps ownership through finishing; a brand inspection still occurs at the state line, but no sale price is generated until the cattle are sold off the rail.
• Backgrounding contracts — calves placed with an in-state or out-of-state backgrounder under a custom-feed agreement, priced outside any auction venue.
• Bull and replacement-female sales — production and private-treaty seedstock sales settled directly, without a sale-barn check.

Honest Cattle also identifies active cattle buyers in this channel, broken out by county in the Cattle Buyers section on each Montana county’s own page.

Montana’s calf crop skews toward large, uniform, well-managed lots — exactly what direct buyers seek and what gains little (and can lose ground) from a sale-barn commingling event. Eastern Montana’s distance from auction infrastructure reinforces this: a load out of Carter or Powder River County is often closer to a Corn Belt feedyard than to a Montana barn.

What we can and can’t see: private-treaty volume is invisible to USDA AMS reporting because no public sale event happens. What survives in the record is the downstream movement — Montana Department of Livestock BE-10 brand inspections (obtained via public-records request) capture every interstate shipment regardless of how it was marketed, which is why they’re the only way to bound this channel from the supply side. USDA also launched a voluntary Montana Direct Cattle Report (AMS 2770) in March 2026; participation has stayed minimal through the summer (most weeks report “no trades”) since neither side has an incentive to disclose terms, so it doesn’t yet produce usable price data — worth monitoring as it matures.

A caveat on price comparisons: private-treaty cattle are widely believed to bring the highest prices of any channel, and that holds for reputation cattle sold in load lots. But most of that gap reflects cattle type, lot size, and health programs rather than the channel itself — a small mixed-quality lot won’t earn a premium just by skipping the sale barn. See the methodology above for the confidence tiers behind these figures.

Seasonal Marketing Patterns

Peak / Moderate / Low describe relative volume moving through a channel that season — not the High/Moderate/Low confidence tags used above.

Where Montana Cattle Go & What’s Still Missing

Montana is a cow-calf state with little in-state feedlot capacity. USDA doesn’t publish Montana-specific placement data, but national Cattle on Feed reports and industry estimates put roughly 70–75% of Montana feeder cattle in Colorado and Nebraska feedlots, with Kansas and Texas taking most of the rest.

The real fix for the private-treaty blind spot is Montana brand-inspection records, and that fix is underway: in response to Honest Cattle’s public-records request to the Montana Department of Livestock, Brands Enforcement Division for all cattle shipped out of state, 2020–2025, the Department has released complete county-of-origin and destination-state summaries for 2022, 2023, and 2024, built from BE-10 brand-inspection certificates and normalized across its legacy Fort Supply and current ServiceNow systems. (One caveat: the Department’s 2024 ServiceNow file caps every inspection record at 19 head or fewer — a data-quality issue Honest Cattle has flagged and will correct once resolved.) The remaining years in the request are still outstanding. Brand inspections capture every animal leaving Montana regardless of how it was marketed — auction, video, or private treaty — which no USDA report does. As the rest of the production comes in, this will let the private-treaty figure above move from a calculated residual to a real, county-by-county shipment count. See the full county-by-county breakdown on the Montana Brand Inspection Data page — that dataset remains the biggest accuracy upgrade this page can get.

USDA Market Reports: Complete Montana Reference

Montana cattle prices also move with national supply and demand, feeder futures, and local weather — tracked in the Weekly Market Forecast. Below is every USDA AMS report that covers a Montana cattle market, in one place. All are free PDFs at predictable URLs.

All reports live at ams.usda.gov/mnreports/. Video reports cover Montana consignments within their North Central regional sections. AMS 2770 was created March 2026 and has had minimal participation through summer 2026.

Limitations, Caveats & Sources

The channel-share figures on this page are estimates, not official data — calculated from USDA NASS calf-crop estimates (official), USDA AMS auction data (official), industry surveys and academic research (estimates), and a residual calculation (approximation). Known sources of error: the replacement-retention rate varies year to year with drought and herd-rebuilding cycles; video-auction volume is partial because not every company reports Montana-specific figures; private-treaty volume bundles several different transaction types; and some cattle may be double-counted if sold at auction and then resold privately.

Honest Cattle cites every source, labels every estimate as an estimate, and publishes this analysis free for Montana ranchers. Corrections and better data are welcome at info@honestcattle.net.

Primary sources: USDA NASS Montana Cattle Inventory · USDA AMS Montana Weekly Livestock Auction Summary · USDA NASS Cattle on Feed · Superior Livestock Auction · Montana Stockgrowers Association · Montana Department of Livestock.