Why now?

February 10, 2011

Hey fellow seekers,

People have all kinds of reasons as to why they calve when they do. Mine is partly about the opportunity to use artificial insemination (AI) on our heifers, along with others from the family so that we can get 85 to 100 in a group.  We push the date forward about as far as the family will allow because the gals are on silage and hay into that first week of May when they could be out on pasture. Average breeding dates are May 7-8. My corn-planting family partners can usually spare some hands about then, and as for February calving, they like that, too. Their goal is to be mostly done by corn planting time.  Even though I might like to wait a couple more weeks, this has usually been manageable, and heifers get a few weeks to catch up and stay in the herd with mature cows that start calving about March 1. My better, AI-bred cows will start a week before that.

    So I have to put up with winter weather, and have developed facilities to cope fairly well. Heifers AND bankers deserve that. The first time I calved a large set of heifers (1999), I was kind of in over my head. It was not a good experience for man or beast and I swore to amend my ways. Most of the heifers were crossbred at the time, and a very cold December had stimulated extra fetal calf growth. A few were AI’d but the leased cleanup bull was not proven for calving ease and I only really knew the sire side.  When (not if) a heifer needed assistance,the facility was a headgate chained to hedge posts with plywood and 2×4 sides. It was not in a barn,nor was it easy to use.

I took stock of my mistakes and considered a better approach when I wrote a Black Ink column the next March: “Get Calves Off To A Value-Added Start.”  It noted the 12-hour window to get some colostrum into the calf as “a key to health at weaning time, performance in the feedlot and carcass quality at harvest. Of course, the first step is to get a live calf. If you’re having trouble in that department, it’s probably not all bad luck. Examine your management, talk to your veterinarian and learn lessons to apply next year. Take a closer look at calving ease genetics and precalving heifer nutrition next time around . . . the first day of a calf’s life is critically important for a value-based future.”

In the years since, I paid much closer attention to predictable calving-ease, registered Angus sires that were balanced to include growth and maternal, but I knew there would always be a need to assist some heifers. It just had to be easier to do. I drew upon all the calving barn stories I had done a few years earlier and built a facility that works well, with room for 3 or 4 pairs inside if need be. Two are in that barn tonight. One needed assistance because of a leg back and the other had a chilled calf that had slipped around on ice rather than stand and nurse, so he spent some hours in the house and seems OK. Four down, 27 to go, and at least one more seems likely to go before morning. They are pretty much all due to calve tomorrow, so will check twice tonight.

The cows took the cold in stride, but for a couple of miscues related to frozen water. Oh, yeah they call that ice. The cow’s side of our supposedly heated automatic waterer froze over on top to where only the heifers

could drink last night, so I opened up a hole in a pond when I got a cold chainsaw to pop. Ten-inch thick ice. Part of the north herd got the idea that there was open water in a deep ravine that usually does flow.  But in the subzero, there was nothing. Most of those cows stayed on the bigger creek where beavers had set up a kind of waterer. The hole they used for a door was about the right size for a cow to drink, Farther down in a narrow spot, rippling water stayed open even on the coldest nights. Back to the wayward gals two ravines east…. I cut ice out of a pond there, too, yesterday. I came back today to reopen and the new cover was 2 inches thick. Glad we are in for a warm-up now, so they say. Hoping to avoid MUD problems!

Until next time… let’s aim for profit, target the brand and build tomorrow together.

~Steve

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