Tracking performance and evaluating herd success should be a year-round process. Similar to tracking athletes, consider developing a score card to monitor your herd. Understanding how your herd is performing throughout the year is important when considering management, nutrition and culling decisions.
“While producers will record individual weaning weights on registered animals, there is also value in collecting that information for commercial cow herds to understand the level of production in the herd,” says Jason Warner, Kansas State University Extension cow-calf specialist. “Recording cow BCS at weaning is very useful for tracking the plane of nutrition of the cow herd and making nutrition decisions going into late gestation.”
Post-weaning and pregnancy check is a good time to evaluate your herd’s success. For weaning, your scorecard may include:
- Calf weaning weight
- Cow body condition score (BCS) or Weight at Weaning (note if drastic change)
- Pounds of calf weaned per cow exposed
- Cow pregnancy data — did she breed in the first or second 21-day cycle?
- Document any illness or injury
- Disposition — identify problematic temperament issues
- Udder quality
- Cow teeth
Weaning Weights
Ron Lemenager, Purdue University beef specialist, says it’s nice to have a weaning weight and considers this fundamental data for making informed management decisions.
John Hall, University of Idaho Extension beef specialist, says, “In an ideal world, you’d be able to collect individual calf weights, but the reality is that probably is not going to happen at the ranch level. For commercial producers, I think the big thing is on the cow side, cow body condition and pregnancy status at weaning or close to weaning is essential, because that’s a valuable indicator of cow performance.”
He says if a group scale is available, he encourages producers to get a group weight of steers and heifers to figure an average steer and heifer weight.
When evaluating calf size, Hall and Lemenager say the goal is for a cow to wean a calf that is 45% to 50% body weight compared to cow.
“If you have cows coming in when it’s been fairly droughty and maybe not the best condition, but she’s a body condition score seven or eight, and her calf’s a little dink at like 300 to 350 lb. — she’s probably not a cow you want to keep in your herd,” Hall adds.
Pregnant or Open
Lemenager recommends doing pregnancy checks before weaning to identify open cows and make early culling decisions. While the cow is in the chute, make sure to check the teeth of the older cows.
“Broken mouth and gummer cows will have a hard time grazing efficiently and maintain their body condition for another production cycle,” he says.
When considering culling decisions, Lemenager encourages producers to also refer to a cow’s records from calving time, including udder scores, disposition, calving difficulty and mother ability.
Hall agrees, saying, “I strongly encourage people to preg check those cows, and with what an open cow is worth these days and what it’s costing us to keep cows around, pregnancy checking pays for itself pretty quickly.”
Lemenager says weaning time is when producers should “make the keep/cull decisions,” because this is when a producer has the most complete picture of a cow’s annual performance. The data collected helps determine which cows should be retained and which should be culled based on their overall productivity and any management challenges they presented during the year.
At pregnancy check, if it looks like a lot of the cows will be later in the calving season, then Hall encourages investigating what’s wrong. Issues to consider are nutrition, heat stress, injury or bull failure. He suggests the goal of 70% of the cows to calve in the first 30 days of the calving season.
Other Scores, Percentages to Review
According to Lemenager, cow BCS is critical for assessing nutritional status and to help make breeding decisions. He adds that grouping cows by BCS scores allows producers to create targeted nutritional programs to aid in maintaining or improving BCS in a cost-effective manner.
As far as the percentage of live calves weaned relative to the number of pregnant females, Jason Warner, Kansas State University cow-calf Extension specialist, says the goal is at least 90%.
Hall encourages producers to figure percentage of calves weaned per cow exposed.
“That’s pretty easy to do,” he says. “Counting number of calves that I have at weaning time versus the number of cows that were exposed over a year ago to calve.”
Warner says ideally, our goal should be to wean a calf crop of at least 85% of calves weaned per cow exposed.
If the exposure number is hard for producers to calculate, another indicator is percentage of calves weaned for cows that were present at the start of the calving season.
“That gives you an idea on things like calf health and cow performance,” Hall explains.
Another trait Lemenager encourages producers to evaluate is udder quality.
“While it is easy to see a bad udder at calving, if it wasn’t recorded, those bad udders will be highly noticeable right after calf weaning,” he says.
Lemenager summarizes weaning is a critical evaluation period where all the year’s performance data comes together to inform important herd management decisions.
Your Next Read: Calf Weaning Series
