The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. Thank you for listening. We are talking calving distribution again this week. Last week, it was all about beef. This week, we're talking dairy. We're talking seasonally calving dairies that's worried about calving distribution. Fortunately, Brad is here who runs an organic and a conventional dairy that both calves seasonally. Thank you again for listening. Please enjoy the episode.
All right, well 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 calves seasonally on the dairy. Fortunately, Brad is here. He manages, well, I guess one dairy with two operations that both calve seasonally and are out on grass. Well, let's start with why do you guys calve seasonally instead of year-round?
Brad: Well, a lot of it is labor. I think we forget about labor in trying to think about calving because calving takes a lot of labor when you have to deal with calves and breeding and all of that. We have chosen to compartmentalize everything. We breed and then we calve and then we breed and then we calve. Everything happens in a short time. Typically, now, for example, it's mid-July, we're breeding and we're not calving.
We have a few calves left on milk, but we don't have to necessarily spend a lot of time focusing on calves and worrying about breeding because sometimes if there's not enough labor, it can get lost and you're trying to do too many things at one time. Labor is probably one of the big reasons why people seasonally calve.
Joe: I know you guys have a very good preg rate up at Morris there. Do you think that's really contributed to a lot of it, that you guys can just focus on breeding when you need to breed?
Brad: It's really about focusing on one thing and not getting distracted on the other things. If you have enough labor, which most dairies typically don't have anyways to do everything, it's nice to be able to focus on certain things so then you can focus on one aspect and not have to worry about the other thing. On some grazing dairies, especially ours, you can have 10 to 15 calves a day in say early spring, March and April when we're calving pretty heavy, but we don't have to worry about breeding because calving and dealing with calves and adequate colostrum and all the things that go around with calving is only happening then and we're not having to worry about breeding.
Emily: Not to mention fresh cow management too, if you're having 10 to 15 a day.
Brad: That's right, fresh cows. There's just a lot of aspects to follow and not having to worry about one of the other things makes it a lot easier.
Joe: You guys calve twice a year then, just spring and fall?
Brad: We do calve spring and fall. The typical grazing herd is maybe end of March to end of May to take advantage to pasture consumption. When pasture growth is great in May and June, cows are in peak production. We also calve in mid-September to end of November, there's the whole economics that go along with that. Cows are in peak production when milk price tends to be a little bit higher. There's lots of advantages either way.
Joe: I've always enjoyed working with dairies that calve seasonally because it does feel like working with a really, really nice tame, comfortable set of beef cows. It's really nice to not get banged around so much in the chute and still do some of the same work. It's been great. A lot of this still applies. You guys are still trying to calve in a 60 to 80-day window, right?
Brad: Yes, we are.
Joe: Perfect. Then again, I assume it works the same way, you want as many pregnant as quickly as possible.
Brad: In a grazing herd, a lot of us talk about percent pregnant by 150 days in milk. That's goal is to get at least 75 to 80% of your cows pregnant by 150 days in milk. If you're able to do that, then you can keep on that seasonally calving. Now I should say, some herds are specific to one season. We calve two seasons because then, if you don't get pregnant in the first season, we can bump you into the second season. You have long days open period or empty period where we're not breeding you, unfortunately, that's what happens.
At least you are allowed a second time to get pregnant if you don't get pregnant in the first season. It's really the maybe young heifers or cows that calve during the end of the one season that maybe only have one chance to be bred. It's typically those cows.
Joe: You have a set criteria for those cows that move. It's not that you bred this cow four times to calve in the spring and she didn't get pregnant, so now you're going to bump her to the fall. It's maybe that she only had a chance to get bread once didn't get pregnant and now we're going to move her to the fall.
Brad: Right, or maybe a young heifer if she just becomes eligible and she's maybe just 14 months and she only gets one breeding, well if she doesn't get pregnant off that one breeding, you probably don't want to cull her and you can wait two months or three months if she's not pregnant and breed her again. Yes, you're going to have a little bit older heifer, but it depends on herd management, size of the herd, all of that, and how to deal with that.
Joe: Do you keep your voluntary weight pretty set, or do you let it be a little flexible because you know you're going to allow more cows a chance? Because if you're aiming for 60 to 80 days and you want them pregnant by 150 days in milk, then your voluntary weight's got to be 60 or 70 days, right?
Brad: In a grazing herd, nothing is ever by the book. Our voluntary waiting period is 55 days. That's when we start breeding. However, we start breeding at certain time points. I'll give an example. We start breeding typically around June 15th for a spring calving. Well, a cow that calves in mid-March, her voluntary waiting period, doesn't matter. Her days to first breeding is going to be 90 days because we don't breed. If she comes into heat after 55 days, we're not going to breed her anyways until she hits our arbitrary June 15th date because we don't want her to calve in February.
Voluntary waiting period, it works but some cows don't work because they don't hit your breeding date for your seasonal calving.
Joe: Do you guys have a minimum at 55 though? If she comes into heat at 40, are you putting semen in her if it's the breeding season?
Brad: No. If she's 55 days and older, then we'll breed you. If you are less than that, we don't take a chance. You get less fertility, things like that.
Joe: I think that's maybe my biggest argument for wanting to have two calving seasons. I'm all for culling animals if they got all their chances but if they don't even get a chance, I'm not going to give up on that cow just because she just had a bad timing. I like having two. I think that's the best. We see that on the beef cow side too. There's some herds out there that will calve spring and fall, but you got to be really careful that the fall herd doesn't just turn into all the animals that should have been culled from the spring herd because then you just get a mass in the fall rather than two good herds.
Emily: On the dairy side also, Brad, wouldn't an advantage of doing a split season versus all of them once would be then you're still producing milk every month of the year? I've been to farms where they have two months, three months where they're making no milk, no production. I would think for most farms, they would view it to be more advantageous to still have production year-round.
Brad: Yes, I would agree. It certainly depends on the farm. It depends on the process or two. I think about it from an organic standpoint. They want people to produce milk in the wintertime because that's when there's demand and if everybody is on a seasonal calving in the spring, well, then there's no cows milking over the winter. You have no production and things like that. Well let's face it, it's probably economics. It provides income during the wintertime. I know it's in Minnesota, the upper Midwest or Northeast, where it's cold. It's not fun to go out and milk cows when it's 30 below zero, but--
Emily: Wear your Cuddl Duds.
Brad: That's right. It goes back to economics. Economics for every farm, every farm is different. Every farm is different management, economics, all of that, so you have to go with that, but two calving seasons do work. They do work.
Joe: Has anybody looked at the seasonal calving dairies, Brad, to see lifetime profitability or just productivity and general based on where they fall in that calving window, just like we talked about on the beef, our most profitable animals always are in the front of the calving season. Is that also the same on the dairy or has anybody looked at that?
Brad: There hasn't been a lot of information out there looking at that to tell whether a fall calving or a spring calving is more advantageous economically, I should do it. Maybe that's Emily's master's, she can get a second master's degree looking at seasonal calving.
Joe: Seasonal calving, spring versus fall.
Brad: Spring versus fall.
Joe: Then also just were you born, did they calve early in the 60-day window or late? That's all just records analysis, right?
Brad: It is, that's right.
Joe: You should have, right?
Brad: It's all just that records. Oh, I should have. I have all of that, we could do it here with our herd.
Emily: You just need a PE on to write the paper.
Brad: That's right.
Joe: That's you.
Emily: Yes, we'll see. I will see.
Brad: I think it's needed, it really is to tell what's better, to take advantage of the spring calving or fall calving and what's better from an economic standpoint. Obviously, it's hard to take into account lifestyle, but--
Joe: It's really fun to know that kind of stuff, even if there's zero difference, that is very, very important to know as well. If there happens to be an advantage for the time of year, we would love there to be an advantage for that's even better, but even if there's no difference, that'd be great to know what the difference in productivity would be. You guys don't use any bulls, so we don't have to get talking into bulls too much.
Brad: No bulls. I am not in favor of using bulls.
Joe: Yes, I'm excited. What if you threw a beef bull out there just as a cleanup when you know that those animals are not, that you don't want them to get pregnant with a replacement anyway.
Brad: Right. Well, if you use a beef bull, it's probably okay, but you want to use a good beef bull, not just any old beef bull either. You want to use something that's good.
Emily: Or heifers.
Brad: Yes, definitely. It's all heifer bull-
Joe: That's what I was trying to say.
Brad: - out there.
Joe: I'm just trying to get a heifer on your place, Brad. I'm surprised I don't see it more, I do see it at some heifer growers.
Brad: Most people are using a dairy bull. Some people will use a dairy bull of a different breed. If you're breeding your Holsteins, put a jersey out there, which Jersey bulls can be pretty nasty too.
Joe: That's my argument [crosstalk]
Emily: Well, as the farm safety expert in the bunch, I'm not a big proponent of bull use just because I think it's dangerous and I think a lot of people think, "Oh yes, I'll try it," and they don't know how to handle a bull properly.
Joe: Yes, I think that's probably an episode we need to do bull safety that can be beef and dairy-
Brad: I agree.
Joe: - and that's farm safety, so that keeps us in Emily's wheelhouse, keeps her on the podcast.
Emily: Yes, and I'm asking this since I asked it when we were talking more on the beef side, and I feel like, but I could be wrong, that on the dairy side, this maybe is where we would see herd size playing a bigger role in how viable this is as a good management option. Brad, you feel like any size dairy could do this or it's better suited to certain sizes, what are your thoughts on that? Joe said for beef, it doesn't really matter in his opinion, but curious what you think for dairy.
Brad: Well, that's a good question. I think any size could do it. I've been to some large grazing herds that are doing it and it does work. Maybe if you had a really large dairy, it might not work to do seasonal-type stuff. It really just depends on the management. I think that here we go again. I think it really goes back to economics and cash flows and all of that because you need, milk pays the bills so you need milk to be able to do that.
Emily: Yes, girls got to eat.
Brad: Exactly. I just think that two seasonal calvings are probably better than just one straight season and you can do it. A lot of even conventional herds do it in the upper Midwest here, where it's well we're not going to calve January, February just because it's too cold and you don't want to expose those calves to coldness or pneumonia, and a lot of other issues. It doesn't mean that you have to calve strictly seasonal, you can just opt out and not calve at certain times of the year.
Joe: Yes, that's fairly common.
Emily: Be a little more selective in what your breeding calendar looks like.
Brad: That's right.
Joe: That's very common and we figure out how to do that for weddings and babies and everything else. We look ahead quite a ways to try to figure out how to not have calvings during a certain time so that's definitely something that's fairly common even on the conventional side. I forgot to ask you about heifers, Bradley. We have decent data to show on the beef side that if they calve or they get pregnant early and they calve correctly as a heifer, then their lifetime productivity in that seasonal system is higher. How strict are you on the heifers as far as culling and how many chances do they get?
Brad: For us, in my opinion, I give the heifers really the same amount of chances I do the cows, will kick them over into a second breeding season if they don't, so then at least if we're talking about a heifer, if a heifer goes through, she is one of the oldest ones in the group, she probably has six chances to be bred because if you get three chances in one season and three chances in the other, a young heifer probably has four chances to get bred if you get one service and one season and three in the other.
I think that probably balances all out so all heifers are getting at least four chances to get pregnant. After that, two seasons, that's enough. If a cow doesn't get pregnant in two seasons or a heifer doesn't get pregnant in two breeding seasons, then then they get culled and they get culled.
Joe: Yes, that makes sense.
Brad: I think you have to because otherwise, you have heifers that are really old or a cow will be 365 days in milk by the time you get there. A heifer can be, if you start breeding you're 20 months of age, 21 months of age, maybe by the time you get a last preg-check so they're either pregnant or not and you probably don't want to be breeding a 21-month-old heifer to try and calve again.
Joe: I forgot to ask about body condition too. With all that big range and some cows not even seeing semen until they're, however many days in milk, how do you keep body condition fairly consistent throughout the group?
Emily: Otherwise Joe's going to come and fat shame your cows.
Joe: I might.
Brad: Well that's a good question because yes.
Joe: Some of the answer might be that you don't, and I mean that's just how it is.
Brad: If you're thinking about a pasture-based herd, it's really hard to monitor body condition in a grazing herd with cows or heifers unless you're supplementing and if you do it with only grass, a heifer will get fat on grass if the grass is good, there's no problem there. Cows suffer infertility if you feed them nothing but grass. It really depends, so choosing to supplement can help reestablish body condition or things that. All of that really goes back to nutrition and what the total purpose is.
Joe: Anything else? Anything else? Any questions?
Emily: [unintelligible 00:19:13] That's a wrap.
Joe: It's a wrap, we're calling that the end. This has been actually two episodes now of just the OG3. We promise to have a guest on soon so you don't have to continue to listen to just us, scathing rebuttals questions, comments, suggestions, you could send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: If you want to catch us on Facebook, we're at UMN Dairy and at UMN Beef. I almost combined dairy and beef there. We try to post as often as we can and would appreciate if you have time to throw us a like, also visit the website extension.umn.edu for more information. Thank you for listening, we'll catch you next episode.
Emily: Oh, we should have put a little teaser out there like YouTube channel coming soon.
Joe: YouTube channel coming soon.
Emily: Always leave them wanting more.
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File name: Copy of Episode 25 - Seasonal calving dairies - UMN Extension_s The Moos Room.mp3
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