BEEF HERD HEALTH

BY W.MARK HILTON, DVM 

 The second most cost-effective procedure your herd health veterinarian can do for you is to pregnancy check your cows. In every economic situation possible, finding the open cows in your herd and marketing them is well worth the time and effort. With cull cows at record high prices, 2024 is a no-brainer. I see my cows as my employees. I make the rules, and they work for me. I give them great care and reward them for their hard work with excellent nutrition and a great place to live. One of my rules is a live calf born and weaned every year. If a cow is found to be open at pregnancy check, she is asking to leave my herd.

In a typical herd, cull cows generate 20 percent of the revenue. Since most cows in the U.S. calve in the spring, they are pregnancy checked in the fall. If we look at the average price of cull cows over the past 10 years, the lowest price of the year is in the middle of November. That’s when most cows go to market, so it is a simple supply and demand equation. My advice is to never sell cull cows near the middle of November.

Call your herd health veterinarian to see how soon they feel comfortable pregnancy checking your cows after the bulls have been pulled. Make an appointment as close to that date as possible. For example, it you calve from April 1-May 31, the bulls would be pulled on Aug. 23. If your veterinarian wants the cows to be at least 40 days pregnant on preg check day, that is Oct. 2.

There are two options to selling cows in the above example. If a cow is in good flesh – Body Condition Score (BCS) 5.5 or better out of 9 – sell her on Oct. 3. If she is thin and you have cheap feed like corn crop residue grazing, put her out on crop residue for 60 days. Then feed her a high corn diet – talk to your nutritionist or veterinarian first – for about 30 days and market her in January when the market rebounds. If you keep a cow to add weight, be sure to deworm her and give her a growth implant.

What are some roadblocks to getting the cows pregnancy checked? Surveys say a lack of facilities and a lack of labor are the two most cited reasons. With excellent cattle prices, now is the time to invest in handling facilities if that is an issue on your farm. In my 41 years of being a beef cattle veterinarian, I cannot recall one client saying after he improved his handling facilities, “Boy, I wish I would have never spent that money,” but what I have heard about a hundred times is, “Why didn’t I spend the money to upgrade my facilities years ago?” A good head catch – call your herd health veterinarian before you buy one as some are ‘junk’ in my opinion – and building a “Bud Box” is not a huge expense. It is in every instance a great investment.

If you could use an extra hand on pregnancy check day, call your herd health veterinarian or local FFA adviser to see if they know of someone that could help for a few hours. Our practice kept a list of people willing to help work cattle.

I did a calculation on feed prices, the value of a cull cow and how long it takes to pregnancy check a herd of 40 cows where three are open. If an open cow eats 35# hay/day at $100/ton for 160 days, that is $280/cow in wasted feed. You won’t realize she’s not going to calve until early June, so she was also on pasture for 45 days, so that’s an additional $30 in wasted nutrition. If you sell her now, you’ve only lost the $310 but if you say to yourself, “well, heck, I kept her this long, I might as well breed her,” you miss out on the $2,000 she would have brought as a cull cow.

If the trip charge, chute fee and veterinarian cost is $400, your profit for the 1.5 hours of work is $530 (or $353/hour) when you sold the three open cows in October.

If you don’t pregnancy check and keep them, then add in another year’s worth of feed. This is assuming they get pregnant. If any are open again the losses keep mounting.

What do you do when you have open cows to cull? With cattle prices expected to peak in 2025 or 2026, you want to be at 90-100 percent capacity on your farm. You are likely better off financially buying bred females to replace these open cows rather than keeping back open heifers so you capture two years of excellent prices.

No matter the replacement strategy, getting your cows pregnancy checked early and sending the open cows to market is the second most cost-effective procedure your herd health veterinarian can do for you. I suggest you call today to make your appointment.