Successfully breeding cows and maintaining pregnancy is always financially beneficial. In today’s cattle market, the value proposition and profit potential of getting a calf to market are even more significant with record-high prices.
“If you’re in the cow-calf segment of the industry, the main driver of profitability is going to be your ability to produce calves,” says Pedro Fontes, Ph.D., associate professor in beef cattle reproductive physiology at the University of Georgia. “That’s highly dependent on whether we can generate and maintain those pregnancies.”
For a cow herd with 100 head, increasing pregnancy rates by 5% and having those additional calves make it all the way to market would result in approximately $12,000 more in gross revenue.
Keep the following strategies in mind when looking to improve your reproductive program to achieve more pregnancies and calves and optimize your income.
Know Your Pregnancy Rate
When evaluating your reproductive program, start with your pregnancy rate. Fontes recommends striving for a 90% pregnancy rate at the end of a controlled breeding season of approximately 65 days.
“Some of this will depend on your production system, what area of the country you are located and the type of cattle you run,” says Fontes. “You might be in a lower input environment, and it could be financially viable to achieve pregnancy rates in the high eighties (percentage) and still be able to profit from your cow herd.”
Management is key to establishing and maintaining pregnancy. Start by meeting the nutritional requirements of your herd via maintaining an average body condition score of 5 or greater. Then, have a quality health program established with your veterinarian that works around your reproductive calendar.
Another important metric is having cows that breed early and thus calve earlier.
“One thing I always try to get folks to think about is getting more pregnancies in those first 21 days of the breeding season,” Fontes says. “The main reason is we know when cows conceive early, they calve early, and they’re going to be more likely to breed back next year. Not only that, but those calves are weaned heavier because they are older at the time of weaning.”
Fontes believes a good benchmark is to have at least 60% of the cow herd calving within the first 21 days of the calving season.
Breed at Peak Estrus
Tightening up the breeding season and having more calves born early can be facilitated with estrus synchronization and artificial insemination (AI). Important to the success of AI breeding is identifying when cows and heifers are in estrus.
“If you synchronize a group of females and expose them to a round of AI, those females expressing estrus will get between 20-30% greater pregnancy rates than the ones that fail to express estrus,” Fontes says.
Estrus expression not only influences the ability of those cows and heifers to conceive, but it also impacts whether they can maintain their pregnancy until calving.
“If you know the estrus status, you can manage those cows appropriately or breed those cows differently,” Fontes says. “One of the things we see producers doing is breeding cows based on estrus expression, even though they might be breeding in a fixed time AI approach.”
How this looks in practice is that a producer can apply a visual estrus detection aid, like an Estrotect Breeding Indicator patch, to monitor estrus intensity. As the patch surface ink rubs off, it indicates the cow is starting to exhibit estrus. If 50% or more of the surface ink has rubbed off, that’s a sign the cow is going into high estrus intensity.
Create More Value per Pregnancy
There is an opportunity with estrus detection to determine which females are the best candidates to breed with higher value genetics or sexed semen to create more value from each pregnancy.
“For those females showing high estrus intensity, more expensive semen or sexed semen can be utilized with higher success,” Fontes says. “Then, the females in lower estrus intensity or showing no estrus can be bred with lower-priced semen. This is another strategy that can help us control the cost of pregnancy.”
Semen from sires that are higher value typically have more performance such as higher weaning weight, yearling weight and marbling which generates additional revenue down the road.
The use of sexed semen is a way to increase the profit potential of pregnancy, too. Steers are worth more than heifers, so breeding for more males is a way to capture additional revenue during strong cattle markets. Also, if you are looking to rebuild your cow herd or develop replacement heifers to sell, sexed semen can be utilized to breed for additional females.
“There are a lot of things that can go south when it comes to reproductive management, but if you do the basics right, you’ll be able to make a big impact on pregnancy rates,” Fontes says. “Beef cows are pretty resilient animals, and if you give them the conditions to perform, they usually do.”
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