The Moos Room™

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[cow moos]
Joe: Hey everybody, this is Dr. Joe Armstrong. Thank you for listening to The Moose Room. Please remember to check out our website extension.umn.edu. Please catch us on Facebook and throw us a like @UMNDairy and @UMN Beef. This episode you hear at the end, we switch to briefly talking about dairy and then we're going to cut. It got too long, and so we're going to split this episode. You'll hear about dairy next week as we talk calving distribution for those dairies that calve seasonally. Thank you for listening, everybody. Please enjoy the episode.
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Welcome to The Moose Room, everybody. We are here today, just the OG3, no guests. We are talking about calving distribution. It's something that came up last week when we were talking with Andrew Swanson about beef genetics. We just want to continue that conversation today. The first thing we're going to get into and talk about-- I guess we should recap real quick to make sure everyone knows we are keeping track of the beef breeds, everybody's favorite beef breeds. We should recap where we're sitting. Emily, remind everybody what your favorite breed is.
Emily: Chianina.
Joe: Chianina, and then Bradley is?
Brad: We're going Hereford.
Joe: Hereford.
Emily: An American classic.
Joe: An American classic. Then we've got two for Black Angus, so Black Angus are leading the way. That would be mine and then Andrew's vote from last week. Got to have more beef guests so you guys have a chance to catch up. That's what we're looking for.
Emily: I really am feeling good about Chianinas pulling out the win on this one.
Joe: I think you might be in the same situation as-- [crosstalk]
Brad: They work really good for show animals. A little Chia in them makes a really nice club calf.
Joe: They're beautiful-looking cattle.
Emily: They're gorgeous, they're big, they're muscly, just the way I like my men.
Joe: [laughs] I knew that was coming next.
Emily: [laughs]
Joe: All right.
Emily: Anyways,-
Joe: Anyways.
Emily: -calving distribution.
Joe: Calving distribution.
Emily: Why does it matter, Joe?
Joe: Okay, calving distribution matters, and we'll come back to this at the end. Really, we could wrap the podcast right after I say this. It's money and it's health. Both are affected by calving distribution. The first step is figuring out how long your calving window is going to be. Actually, the first decision is that you're going to define that time length. Some producers don't. You've got calves dropping year-round, bulls out there year-round. Sometimes that's a space issue, sometimes there's some lack of labor that goes into that, but really, the first step is figuring out, are you going to define a time frame?
Usually, what we think about is, all right, how long is a cow cycle? She's got a 21-day cycle, how many cycles should you give her before she either is or isn't going to be pregnant? On the dairy side, we talk about, that's always up for debate, how many breedings are you going to give a cow? I have my opinions, I'm sure Brad and Emily have theirs as well, but on the beef side, I'm going to have to get pregnant. They have to have a calf every year, or they really shouldn't be in your herd.
There's a lot of studies out there to show that actually, if you leave the bull in pretty much year-round, after 90 days, it really doesn't make a big difference for your pregnancy rate.
Even if you leave the bull in 120 days, your pregnancy rate will be no better than it was at 90 days. When there's two, three, four stragglers, I think that's where we have to draw the line and really, that's what the studies are telling us.
Yes, that's where I start. 90 days is where I begin the conversation. If you're going to pick a timeframe at all just to start with, 90 days is great. Now, that still gives you four, four and a half cycles. For a beef cow, that's a long time. She better get pregnant, I think, in three. That is plenty of time for a properly taken care of beef cow to get pregnant.
Emily: Three strikes, you're out.
Joe: Three strikes, you're out. 60 days, it should be your calving window. I've said that the entire time I was in practice, and I don't really waver from it. There's some select, very few situations where it makes sense to expand it because of seed stock operations, AI, but now that we have genomic testing to know what parents or whose parents are who, and whose kids are whose, then you know you don't have to extend it out for that reason anymore. Or, do the old Hereford trick. I forgot to mention this last week. To know parentage, there's some guys on the Angus side that will AI everybody Angus, and then they'll throw a Hereford cleanup bull out. Then they know if they come out Baldy, AI didn't stick.
Emily: That happened on our farm. A guy came and bred a cow, and then he had a breeder again, but he didn't have that same bull, so he just put milking Shorthorn in her. Then we had to wait to see what color the calf was.
Joe: Yes, there's definitely ways around all that.
Emily: Who's your daddy?
Joe: Who's your daddy? Important question. Important question. Yes, I like 60 days. There's a lot that goes into that and there's a lot of calculations you can do and look at the timeframe for why I like 60. Most of it is that she better get pregnant in three chances or she probably should leave. Other than that though, it's about recovery time after pregnancy. You need some time to recover, believe it or not after you've had a calf. That cow can't just immediately become pregnant the next day, and you wouldn't want her to anyway.
Emily: Weird, biology.
Joe: Yes, biology. Minimum, we're talking three weeks, three to four weeks before she's ready to get pregnant again. Really, that can stretch out to 30 to 45 days to be realistic. If you look at how many days are in the year and if you want that cow to calve on the same day she calved this year, there's not a whole lot of time for much more than that.
Brad: How long is a typical calving season in a beef herd? They all like to do it in a couple of month time period? Or, for our dairy, at least here in Morris, we like to calve everything within a two, two and a half month time period. Three breedings, that's about max. Some cows or heifers don't even get three breedings.
Joe: Right. I think on the beef side, it ranges all over the place. You've got guys that have got it really, really, really tight. Their whole breeding season or calving season is 42 days, so two cycles. You can get that tight with doing a couple of different things. Then, there's all sorts of people that are all the way on the other end too and everything in between where you don't have a calving season at all. You just calves calve when the calve, cows are just out there with the bull all the time, and that's a completely different management style.
Emily: Chaos reigns.
Joe: Like I said, there's different reasons for that. If you're looking to be the most profitable that you can be, you have to have a tight window, in my opinion. It needs to be tighter for heifers even, because you're making your selections based on fertility in those heifers. Really, you should be really strict on your requirements for those heifers so that they can stay in your herd and get pregnant again and you're really selecting for that fertility. You really shouldn't be giving your heifers very much time at all. I'd love to AI heifers if I can, and then I'd love to keep that calving window on those heifers at 42 days. 42 days would be great on heifers. I like 60 to 80 days on the cows, so very similar to what the dairy is doing.
Emily: What impact, if any, does herd size have on calving distribution? I have 30 cows, Brad has 300 cows, would you make the same recommendations for both of us? I know there's all those other factors, labor, et cetera, but just strip all that away for a second, and just from a numbers standpoint, herd size, does it make any difference?
Joe: No, not in my opinion. Really, you want to be as tight as possible no matter what. When we're talking about that, and we talked about it last week with Andrew, we're talking about money. Money that's on the table. We talked about a lot of different things that can affect calf size, calf weight, and we're paid by the pound, right? We always say, everybody thinks genetics, everybody thinks feed, everybody thinks all these things that matter all this much for calf size.
Really, when it comes down to it, the most important factor is age. Just older calves are heavier. The more time I can give those calves to grow, the heavier they're going to be when I sell them, and that's why we want to have a tight window. Preferably, even within that window, we want to push everything all the way to the front, so that those calves are uniform and we have the most chance for them to get big, just purely based on time. It's uniformity and consistency that goes along with that too, so I don't think it changes based on herd size. It should be just a general thing that you should try to do with any beef herd, even if you only have two calves.
Emily: Joe, do you have a preference of season for calving? Brad, I know you guys do, this is the season of the year we like to do it. I know there are people that swear by doing that late winter, early spring thing, other people are doing fall. I've seen all sorts of things, so I'm just curious what both of your thoughts are on the actual season of the year when calving's happening.
Joe: I really tend to defer to the person that's going to have to be doing all the management and labor and all those other things to decide that. Here, in Minnesota, you obviously try to avoid mud. Mud is your biggest enemy, and you need to try to figure out how to avoid that as much as possible. There's certain months that I prefer everyone to stay away from, unless you have amazing facilities that you can bring cattle in to get out of the mud.
Emily: Everybody's on concrete. [chuckles]
Joe: Yes. That's what you really need if you're going to pick certain months in Minnesota. I would prefer to go really early January, February. Then again, you can need different kinds of facilities because now you're worried about keeping everybody warm enough. When I'm talking to people that are just starting out and maybe it's a hobby, maybe it's something that they're looking to grow. If it's not their main profession, if they're trying to do this on the side and they have a day job in town, I love fall calving. I absolutely love it. Why wouldn't you pick a calving ease bull, and have all your calvings happen in September? The perfect time of year. They can be on pasture. There's no mud. There's just so many advantages to that.
That's something we seriously talk about with anybody who's just getting started and definitely anybody who has a day job, especially if it's not very flexible. Then, at least you're still in the time of the year where days are fairly long. When you do get home from your day job, it's still light out and go check cattle in the daytime. It's a lot easier to learn some of the stuff you need to know, rather than trying to do that in the middle of the night in January.
Emily: Yes, and you had a calf on the ground for six hours, and she doesn't have ears anymore.
Joe: Exactly. It comes down to management style for me and what time of year you're going to do. Now if you're going to do seed stock, you got to be early because you just have older bulls by the time you sell. Again, it comes down to size and weight and actually, maturity for breeding.
Brad: I've heard some beef producers talk calving. Some like to calve in the spring, but there's others that like to calve in the fall because you have to think about when those animals are going to market. In certain seasons, they may be, you get a better price for those animals going to market, which is typically maybe in the springtime from fall-born calves. I think obviously, economics is the big thing, the big driver, even though probably a majority of people have spring calves, but there may be an advantage to some fall calving as well because of economics behind it.
Joe: Yes, totally agree. There's definitely a supply and demand thing there. Majority of the calves are born in the spring. If you have fall calves, you're hitting a market that isn't overwhelmed with that size calf and that size feeder.
Brad: It's the same for the dairy world as well because milk price is a little bit higher typically in the wintertime because you have butter and cheese and everything for the holidays. If you want to have more production, so maybe you would calve in the fall and get maximum production for that time of the year, versus milk prices down a little bit in the spring and summertime. It's that way, especially for grazing herds, but we do see that in the conventional world too, that the milk price tends to be up a little bit higher in the fall time.
Joe: Yes, it's a perfectly good reason to try to switch the calving season around, no matter what you do beef or dairy. There's just too many situations now where we have people that don't work full-time on the farm and they're trying to manage two different things they want to meet. There's certain decisions that you can make that may or may not be conventional, but it just makes life easier for you if you're doing that. One of those things for me, on the beef side for sure, is if you calve in the fall, you're making things a lot easier for you from a management standpoint if you got a daytime job.
All right, the other piece of this whole thing that I think is really, really important, and it has a lot to do with just how heavy those calves are, like we talked about that are born early in the calving window, the more you can stack it towards the front, the more you can have your calves born in the first cycle. When we really look at that, you define your 60 days and then you need to define when you want your calves born. Really, the average or your goal initially, should be 60% of your calves born in the first 21 days, and 25% born in the second 21 days, and then 10% born in the third. That's a pretty standard look for me. That gives you a 5% open rate.
Anything you can do after that to push it towards the front is a bonus. You're adding basically marginal pounds or however you want to look at it, if you want to talk about marginal milk. There's lots of different ways to do that. Ton of different ways to do that. We alluded to it last week, we talked about sinking cows. Sinking cows and pushing everything towards the front so everybody's at the same time. I know Andrew didn't probably appreciate it that we're talking about you can put bulls out, but you can put bulls out.
Brad: [chuckles]
Joe: If you don't have the ability or for whatever reason, don't want to AI, you can put bulls out with synced cows, and you don't need extra bulls to do that, which is really surprising to me. It really, really blew my mind when I saw that research out in Nebraska to show that there was no difference in pregnancy rate if you added more bulls, versus if you kept the traditional stocking rates for bulls. That was nice to hear because now, you've got this big tool in your pocket, but you don't need to go out and purchase more bulls to make it work. It makes it pencil out so much easier. Sinking cows is one of the ways to do it.
Probably the easiest way to do it is to make sure your cows are healthy. We look past it a lot sometimes and we think about bulls a lot when we're talking about breeding, but that momma cow has to be the perfect body condition, and she should be a stable body condition year round. A lot of the stuff we talked about with scours too. There's a lot of overall health and management things that you do to get your breeding seasons straight and right, and that's bunk space, that's body condition scoring and knowing what it's supposed to look like, those kind of things.
Brad: Doesn't nutrition play a big role in all of this, more so trying to get your cows pregnant at a certain time and probably goes along with it, but maybe nutrition isn't somewhat stressed enough to be able to do that, which goes back to body condition score. At least in my mind, body condition score makes up a lot for pregnancy status, at least in the dairy herd.
Joe: Oh, absolutely, 100%. The nutrition is way overlooked sometimes. Like I said, we focus on the bull primarily and you forget about that cow. It's not just about having enough calories and having enough groceries because you can have way too many. Fat cows don't get pregnant either. It's about being the correct body condition as much as possible and being consistent with it. That makes a big, big difference in your ability to get pregnant and actually, makes a huge, huge difference in your ability to recover from pregnancy and get everything working correctly so that you can get pregnant again. All that stuff that we've talked about in the past with the scours and everything else, just good maternal health is going to make up for a lot of different things.
The other piece of this is that your best cows and your most profitable cows always calve early, and it's mostly because their calves are heavier, but then they stay there. There's some studies out there that show that we're back to productive longevity. We talked about this on the dairy, on the beef side, it doesn't matter. You want cows that stick around a long time and pay for themselves over and over and over again. That's what you get when you get your heifers, especially your heifers, to calve in that first 21 days right away.
If they calve in that first 21 days as a heifer in your calving distribution, they're much, much more likely to stay in your herd and be more profitable. One of the studies that I love to look at, it came out of Texas A&M, and they were looking at different distributions and they were looking on lifetime return on investment based on when they calve as a two-year-old. It's absolutely amazing, the numbers. We're looking at, in the first 21 days versus if they calve, let's just look at if they calve in the fourth 21 days. That's if you have a 80-day calving season.
There's consistently a 10% or more difference in your return on investment in favor of that animal when they calve in the first 21 days versus the fourth. It just sets them up on their lifetime if they calve right and they calve in that first 21 days right away. We haven't talked about health yet, have we?
Brad: No.
Emily: Let's talk about health, Joe.
Joe: [chuckles] Good transition, Em.
Emily: Here, I got a better one. All right, Joe, so--[crosstalk]
Joe: Let's talk about health, baby.
Emily: Let's talk about health, baby. Let's talk about you and me. You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, Joe, that calving distribution really comes down to two things, money and health. We've really talked about the one, so now, let's get to the other on this.
Joe: When we talked about money already and how uniform calf crop everything upfront, older calves, it's all more money, but you are helping yourself on the health side too, for sure. Again, talk about this in the scours episodes, but we're looking at pathogen accumulation and how much is there in your calving area. If you keep good records and you can see who got sick every year with scours, I would tend to say that those cases focus later in your calving window because pathogens have had time to accumulate and they're exposed to more. The more we can push everybody towards the front, those calves are old enough to handle it by the time they're exposed to a lot of those pathogens and how they've accumulated.
Again, it's a health thing. Trying to get everybody towards the front and get everything tight, can help you deal with those scours issues and everything else when it comes to exposure. We should talk about bulls. Bulls are important. I know we talked about earlier how everyone talks about the bulls already and they forget about mom, but bulls play--
Emily: Let's talk about bulls, baby. Sorry.
Joe: Supercut at the end, for sure.
Emily: Of me singing terribly.
Joe: Not terribly.
Emily: Not well.
Joe: Bulls play a big role in this calving distribution and specifically, a big role in where those calves fall in your calving distribution. Are they going to be towards the front? Are they going to be strung out? That has to do with the health of that bull. First of all, getting that bull tested. A lot of guys don't test their bulls and it's dangerous, very dangerous. It's very cheap insurance for you when your entire operation counts on having a calf crop. I've been to way too many preg checks that are just cringe-worthy and I say open a lot. We're in fall now. It's done, it's over, your calf crop is set.
One memorable one, I preg checked a hundred cows, and there was 16 pregnant. 16 pregnant. That was all the bull's fault. He just wasn't right and they didn't test him. Now you've got 16 calves when you thought you had a hundred. That's devastating. Test your bull. I'm just throwing a shameless plug out there for you. Talk to your veterinarian, test your bull. Get everything tested. Remember, that doesn't mean just the semen. He needs to be able to walk, he needs to be able to see, he needs to be able to smell. All those things come into it. He needs to be healthy, and he can't be fat. I hate fat bulls, hate fat bulls so much.
Emily: Are you really fat-shaming bulls right now?
Joe: Yes, 100%.
Emily: Wow.
Joe: 100%, period. They get lazy and they don't want to do things, and it messes with the testicles, and then they get too hot, and sperm quality goes down. Don't have fat bulls. The big thing with the test is that it tells you they're good that day and it doesn't test libido. They can have good semen, they can have good feet and legs, they can do all this stuff, and then you turn them out to pasture, and they just go lay down and eat. They don't ever breed a cow because they just have no drive to do it. You need to watch him once he goes out there to make sure he's doing his job and make sure he doesn't get hurt when he is trying to do his job.
We've talked about beef a ton now. We're going to transition over to talking about dairy. All the stuff we talked about, a lot of it applies to calving seasonally on a dairy. A lot of our grazing herds, organic herds do calve seasonally on the dairy. Fortunately, Brad is here. He manages a dairy that two-- I guess one dairy with two operations that both calve seasonally and are out on grass. Let's start with, why do you guys calve seasonally instead of year-round?
Brad: A lot of it is--
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Joe: That is a wrap on this episode. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll move on to calving distribution and seasonal calving dairies next week. As always, scathing rebuttals, comments, questions, suggestions, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu. That's T-HE-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Thank you for listening. Catch you next week.
Emily: Let's talk about calves, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about stress, baby. It happens to you and me.
Joe: Let's talk about health, baby.
Emily: Let's talk about health, baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about bulls, baby. Sorry.
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