First off, I thought I would throw in a picture I took of working on a set of corrals this fall. We had torn down the old set, and "modernized" them, trying to streamline things for a smooth shipping day, and for other cattle working projects.On this ranch, we have never calved early because of shelter, feed, weather, etc., but over the last few years we have backed our calving up later, for several reasons.
Since the horrible spring blizzard we had on April 5th thru 7th in 1997, we have gradually moved the calving date back to around April 7-8th from March 20th or so. That was a brutal, cold blizzard that killed a lot of stock in this area.
A year and a half ago, we added some property to our ranch, and it spread us out enough during calving, so we started a second herd of even later calving cows, with a due date of April 20-25th. That is still not completely out of the woods as far as spring storms are concerned, but should eliminate some of the cruddy, cold days that are tough on baby calves. The cows in that herd calve unassisted with us looking at them every now and then as time permits, but they are on their own for the most part. They calved that way with very good success this last spring. I think later calving is what we are going to see in a lot of operations in the future.
I will have to add more about the costs/expenses, and other thoughts on this topic in other posts later on.
2 comments:
I've considered moving my calving date a little later from my traditional first of March time frame but haven't done it yet. You always have to worry about the weather even later so I take my chances.
I remember my dad talking about a spring storm on April 26th, I don't remember the year, when he got 4 feet of snow on the level and it killed over 90% of his calves and 20% of his cows. Even late you can get hit once in a while.
My cows calve in the hills on their own but they have real good shelter so even in a fairly nasty storm the majority of them can save their calves. Not the best thing in the world but the best comprise I've found yet.
We calve starting the first part of April but one of the worst storms we had was the 10th of May and we had cattle scattered all over the place. The calves were a bit older and we had a few cold ones but didn't lose any.
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