Blaine Lotz – Answering the Cattle Call

Blaine Lotz

Blaine Lotz

Answering the Cattle Call

By Ronald Sklar

Blaine Lotz doesn’t just sell cattle – he conducts them. Listening to him talk about auctioneering is like hearing a jazz musician explain improvisation: part discipline, part instinct, part invisible rhythm that lives in the body. A Kansas native born into a multigenerational auction family, Blaine approaches his craft with both old-school seriousness and an artist’s obsession with tone, harmony, and timing.

Blaine’s reputation isn’t just par for the course – it’s been tested and validated in the most unforgiving arenas of the trade. In 2012, he won the Kansas Auctioneer Association Livestock Bid Call Contest at the Southeast Kansas Stockyards in Gas, Kansas, a proving ground where only the cleanest voices and sharpest number work survive.

Two years later, he reached the sport’s highest summit when he captured the 2014 World Livestock Auctioneer Championship, confirming what buyers and sellers already knew: his chant wasn’t just beautiful – it was effective. For Blaine, though, trophies are secondary to trust. As he puts it, honesty remains “one of the top keys of my business, who I am, what I do and how I conduct myself.”

Ethics matter to him more than anything.

“An auctioneer has control of a lot of things,” he explains. “It is extremely key to be honest, because if anyone thinks that you’re on one side or the other, that’s going to hinder your image, your business, everything.”

At heart, he is not interested in spectacle. He is interested in flow.

“I’m a really fast-paced person,” he says. “I do everything fast except drive. I auctioneer my life.”

That line isn’t a joke. His entire psychology has been shaped by the reality of standing behind a microphone, moving millions of dollars’ worth of livestock through a room in minutes, reading faces, reading hands, reading energy, and never slowing down.

And yet – despite the roar of his profession – Blaine is deeply quiet in spirit. He dislikes social media. He resists digital noise. He wants his mind clear.

“I don’t post at all or get on there much anymore,” he says. “I didn’t even do social media at all before that.”

What turned him off was not the technology but the chaos. “I’d post a picture… and next thing you know, there’s two people in the comments, and they’re fighting about something that’s not even related to me.”

For a man who lives by precision, that kind of disorder feels wrong. Blaine believes in clarity – in numbers, in tone, in ethics.

Blaine Lotz

That commitment is personal. His father is a professional cattle buyer who purchases animals in the very auctions Blaine conducts. The temptation for conflict of interest exists – and so Blaine overcorrects in the direction of integrity.

“My dad is extremely active buying cattle. That’s another reason why honesty is so huge to me,” he says. “Day of auction, he’s not my dad.”

This is not performative virtue. It is survival. In auctioneering, trust is currency.

Blaine’s personality blends businessman and performer. He sees himself as an agent between two sides – buyer and seller – but also as an entertainer who must make the room come alive.

“You’ve got to be an entertainer, kind of like a country singer,” he says. “And then you’ve got to have the business side – the wheeling and dealing – to market the animals.”

That duality – art and commerce – is the key to understanding him.

Nowhere is that clearer than in how he developed his chants. Unlike many auctioneers who repeat mechanical rhythms, Blaine trained himself to auction to music.

“I would actually auctioneer to something like an Elvis Presley song,” he explains. “You want to have that tone, the pitch, the smoothness – the music of the business.”

To Blaine, bad auctioneering is like noise pollution. He hates chants that sound like “a herd of mosquitoes knocking on your ear.” He wants people to be able to sit in his auctions for ten hours without irritation. That requires elegance and control.

“I’m like an 80% number, 20% filler auctioneer,” he says. “I’m always bouncing on numbers rather than bouncing on filler.”

That clarity is why buyers trust him. When Blaine calls a bid, people know exactly where they stand.

“The best way I describe it is just a fast-paced conversation,” he says. “I’m literally having a fast-paced one-on-one conversation with a buyer.”

Check out Blaine in action for Interstate All Battery Center.

He understands urgency as psychology. If bids come slowly, buyers hesitate. If they come musically, they act.

“That’s why auctions are so crucial – because you get so much accomplished in a short amount of time.”

Blaine reads people the way a poker player reads tells. He knows who’s seasoned and who’s new by how they move.

“Somebody jumping up and down – that’s not necessarily seasoned,” he says. “Somebody cool, calm, collected – that’s someone professional.”

This observational sharpness comes from growing up inside the industry. His grandfather was an auctioneer. His mother sold livestock; his father bought it; they married. Blaine calls himself “born into the business.”

“I didn’t really have a choice, which I’m totally fine with,” he says. “When you find a knack for something, there’s no reason to go look for anything else.”

At the tender age of 15, he attended the Western College of Auctioneering (“the Cadillac of auction colleges”) – three years earlier than allowed – because his mother persuaded the college to let him in. That early start gave him an enormous edge.

“I was like an insane sponge,” he says. “I built a chant. I took off.”

Then something strange happened.

“I practiced and practiced, and hit a wall,” he recalls. “One night I went to bed… when I woke up the next day, I could auctioneer like nobody’s business.”

He doesn’t pretend to understand it. He just knows it happened.

That’s Blaine Lotz in a nutshell: grounded, skeptical, disciplined – honing his gift into something more. He sells cattle, but what he really moves is energy – and millions of dolly-allars.

Copyright ©2026 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: January 13, 2026.

Photos ©2025. Courtesy of Blaine Lotz. All rights reserved.