Beef Herd Health

By W. MARK HILTON, DVM

 Imagine that you own an agricultural business where you employ 25 full-time workers. You grow five different crops, have livestock, and started a retail store that is thriving. Your employees are all from the surrounding community and you have known them or their parents for many years. They depend on you and your business for their livelihood, and you are proud of providing for them.

Your workers put in long hours – 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. – every day and as a bonus for their hard work, you provide all three of their meals every day.

You hire a new worker to replace a retiring member of the team and she is a solid worker for the first year on your team. Then you notice that she comes in at 7 a.m., but sneaks away right after breakfast and rides her bicycle back to her house a half mile away. She then shows back up just before lunch and then it’s back home. She does the same thing just before dinner. You talk to her and explain that this behavior is unacceptable, but the pattern of just showing up to eat and doing no work continues.

What do you do?

One of your livestock enterprises is a beef cow-calf business. It is June 15 and you are out walking in the pasture. You admire your 25 cows and their calves grazing on this beautiful late spring day. You are especially pleased that all your 2-year-old heifers calved unassisted and seem to be doing a good job of raising their calves.

Now it is Oct. 1 and it is pregnancy check day. Your veterinarian is palpating the cows and assessing their body condition score (BCS). The cows had decent grass due to the fact you use Management-intensive Grazing, and she is calling each cow a BCS 5 or 6 out of 9. You know that having a short breeding season is good for your beef business, so you limit the breeding season to 65 days. So far, each cow has been confirmed pregnant. Into the chute walks cow #63. She is one of your first calf females and your doctor turns and says, “Sorry, she’s open.” She finishes palpating the cows and notes that you had an excellent day with 24/25 pregnant. “That’s a 96 percent pregnancy rate in 65 days. “You can’t do much better than that,” she says.

What do you do with cow #63?

If you would replace the unproductive worker in the first scenario with a productive one, shouldn’t the second scenario have the same answer? Why would we allow a cow that has zero chance to be a productive member of the herd to continue to eat our hay and minerals and graze our pastures. Why should this cow remain on the payroll? Our valuable resources need to be used by productive members of our team.

If it costs $300 to feed a cow through the winter and your projected profit/cow next year is $400 (some predictions have it even higher than that), keeping an open cow represents a loss of $700 to the beef business. Cull cow prices are at an all-time high and replacing the open cow with a bred female makes excellent economic sense.

The only good way to catch these non-productive employee cows is to pregnancy check every cow in the herd. This is also a great time to check for feet and leg issues that may impact productivity along with body condition scoring the cows. This may also be the time to invest in the pregnant cows by vaccinating, deworming, and pouring for external parasites.

I am just like most beef producers. I love my cows and they receive excellent care. I am also running a business and if one of my cows is open, she is the same as an employee showing up to eat but doing zero work. She needs to be replaced.