Cow-Calf Programmed Practice

Abstract

I am sure glad to see Dr. Fred Wood here from Osceola! I felt like a hayseed from Missouri with you people talking about 5,000 head! I felt I was in the wrong meeting but we are dealing with farmers and ours is a three man mixed practice in northwest Missouri. Our numbers are not going to approach 5,000 head. I started my practice about eight years ago and my main concern at that time was being with farmers that were bull crop people and my main concern was developing herd health programs for feeder pig finishing operations. The beef cows were a secondary enterprise to the hogs. The cows were just scavengers to pick up roughage and take up slack in the wintertime. At that time, the average cow herd was about 30 head and the feedlot that had 100 head was a sizeable operation, so that is just a basis to where we started eight years ago. We noticed about five years ago a trend was starting to develop in our feedlots and the people all of a sudden who previously were handling 100 head, were jumping up from 500 to 1,000 and some of them went even higher. Our cow herds were jumping from 30 to an average of about 100, with some going up to 700 and 800 so, in other words, almost overnight these farmers became feedlot operators and cow ranchers. As a result, a lot of these operators did not bring along a lot of experience or know-how into their specialized operations and it looked like a good time for us to step in with some sort of a herd health program to assist them and this is what I would like to present today. In five years our farmers tripled their cow herds and a lot of them did not have the ability to handle an operation of this size 13 so they were willing for us to step in to help them.