Mark Johnson, Oklahoma State University Extension Beef Cattle Breeding Specialist, offers herd health advice as part of the weekly series known as the “Cow Calf Corner” published electronically by Dr. Peel, Mark Johnson, and Paul Beck. Today, Johnson talks about recording data to improve your cow herd.
Sound management decisions to improve genetics, management practices and profit potential of cow-calf operations should be based on data. This comes in two forms: financial data and production performance data. The day-to-day management responsibilities involved in beef production can leave very little time to assess the overall performance of the herd or financial records. From time to time, it is important to step back and evaluate our production system. For spring calving herds, weaning time is happening now or will happen soon. Weaning time is the best time of year to measure, quantify and document herd performance. Why? Because it is likely the ONLY day of the year in cow-calf production that ALL our beef herd inventory is caught and can be processed. This creates the potential to not only weigh calves but also the opportunity to preg check, evaluate and weigh our cows. Herd health practices like de-worming and vaccinating can be performed. If we have an ink pen and note pad, adequate facilities and labor on hand, weaning day can yield a bounty of information which can be assessed to drive better management decisions.
What information should we collect?
- Pregnancy status of the cow herd
- Weight of Cows
- Weight of Calves
- Some metric for evaluating udders, eyes, feet and legs, temperament.
- Depending on how thorough and the duration of your record keeping and what you know about the age of your cows, it may be important to evaluate mouths and teeth.
- Body Condition
What can we learn from this data?
Cows are the production factory in a cow-calf operation. They consume pasture plants and return nutrients to the soil and plants in the form of urine and manure. The cow herd requires input expenses, there is opportunity cost on the dollars we have tied up in our cow inventory and pasturelands. The only opportunity to operate at a profit is when the production factory yields a weaned calf of greater value than the annual cost of owning and operating the production factory. The data collected can inform you about the efficiency of your production factory.
The ebb and flow of the cattle cycle and the nation’s cow inventory impacting the value of cattle is well documented. Markets look robust for the next several years. Production records like the percentage of breeding females exposed that actually raised a calf to weaning, the percentage of calves born that survived to weaning and the percentage of our cow’s mature weight that they are weaning off are some important benchmarks of cow productivity. They serve as a means to determine efficiency and can be used to improve management and selection decisions that will result in more profitability. All of these benchmarks of productivity can be calculated from the data captured at weaning. Seize the opportunity.
