Cow-Calf Herd Management Practice

Abstract

Our practice falls way short of most of what has been talked about. A little of Dr. Barron's pet practice and mostly somewhere in between! We have a three-man practice in southern Iowa, 45 miles south of Des Moines. Seventy-five percent of our time is connected with cow-calf problems of various types; a lot of our time is spent in consultation and management-mostly on a feed basis. These herds generally range from 50 to 200 head. The other gentlemen talked about contractual work with 18 or 25 big operations. I believe that ours falls in the neighborhood of 400 and it would be a little difficult to make a very specific arrangement and fit one arrangement to all 400. Our consulting or management practices are mostly on an individual basis and attempting to handle their various needs. Our herds are mostly owner operated, owner managed herds. Corporation farming is almost completely nonexistent and the only corporation farming we have are family owned corporations. Ninety percent of the calf production in our area is sold at seven or eight months of age, or yearlings at the latest. We go into feedlot areas in northern and western Iowa primarily and are dealing basically with cow replacement heifers, the calf to about eight months of age and the bull "battery." The beef cow business is not as sophisticated as the dairy business and we do not have accessibility to computers like these dairymen seem to have, but we are at least getting beef cow men to identify their cows with an ear tag and identify their calves when a calf is dropped. We are getting a few of them to weigh their calves at birth, to base their selection on performance, and to buy performance tested bulls. We are also doing pregnancy examinations now so that we do not carry nonpregnant cows through the winter. We conduct fertility examinations on a high percentage of the bulls before they are sent to pasture in the spring.