By Dr. Roy Burris
I tend to oversimplify things – or at least try to break them down to their simplest components. Let’s take the cow herd, for example. The cow is the factory that takes raw inputs (like grass) and turns them into a product, – which for most of us is a feeder calf. So the most important thing that she will ever do is to have a live calf. The quality of the calf and how we get there is important too.
Most of the time what is lacking in us as managers is the ability to come up with a good breeding plan and the discipline to stay with it. I remember one producer that would study all of the breed magazines throughout the winter and then pick a different breed of bull every spring. I suggested that he pick a breeding program and stay with it, so that he would have some uniformity in his herd.
When I took over the UK herd at Princeton, it was kind of like that too. So my plan was to breed all of the heifers and young cows to Angus bulls that were selected for maternal traits and save their heifer calves to make replacements as quickly as possible. We bred old cows to a terminal cross (in this case Charolais) to produce heavy feeder calves to sell. Well, when I sold those big feeder heifers and kept the calves from the young cows folks began to say that I had gone crazy and was selling our best calves! But confidence (or stubbornness) wasn’t a problem for me and I stayed the course. My goal for the herd was to generate replacement females that we could work with and that were generally representative of the Kentucky cow herd. There are lots of breeding programs that will work but you need to pick a good one and have the discipline to stay with it.
The easiest thing to do is to make cattle bigger. We’ve known for a long time that a two-breed cross female bred to a third breed bull would give the most heterosis. I did a trial in the 70’s in which 2-breed cross calves and 3-breed cross calves weaned 30 and 75 lbs., respectively, heavier than their straightbred contemporaries. We can use smaller maternal breed cows bred to a third breed (terminal) bull and get those big feeder calves. That is all I was doing.
We generally sell feeder calves by the pound – so we can justify big calves. However, big calves generally make big cows. We can easily select for size in any breed. Hence, the 1600 pound cows that now make up the “maternal” breeds. I was at a field day at a purebred producer’s farm and the place was a buzz at the exhibit where you could guess the weight of a virgin heifer. They asked me to guess how much she weighed and I said “too much”. The correct answer was 1500 lbs. An old rule of thumb is a cow should wean half of her bodyweight. Still not a bad goal.
Cattle breeding and selection is a continual process – it never stops. You are constantly evaluating the cows and calves as they “select” themselves (i.e. produce high quality calves in your environment). Picking a time to cull a cow or calf after you make the decision to cull can be tricky, too.
Cows and bulls that have disposition problems are likely to become a liability and should be sold as soon as possible. However, cows with some structural problems like feet and legs, or udders and teats can wait until it is timely to sell them – as long as you are disciplined enough and keep good enough records to avoid saving their offspring as replacements. It is important that cows be culled while they are still healthy and marketable. Udder problems are especially worrisome – not just because they are heritable but a newborn calf might not be able to nurse. So it may be best to get rid of them before they calve.
I’m not a geneticist but I know that a lot of genes “line up” each time we breed a cow and a bull so there is no assurance that each calf will be a good one. There are times when you need to put the papers down and evaluate a cow on her own merit. Be disciplined enough to cull those that need culling regardless of their sire or blood lines.
In this business it seems that we are constantly looking for “outliers” when perhaps, we should be seeking to moderate traits like frame size. Most cows are big enough – unless they are weaning 800 lb. calves. A.I. allows you to use multiple bulls. I like to evaluate cows for height, muscling, capacity, etc. and breed them to bulls that might improve those traits, which generally means breeding “to the middle” rather than looking for extremes. We seem to be looking for an animal that is as big as a draft horse, milks like a Holstein, marbles like a Wagyu, is muscled like a Belgium Blue and gentle as a lamb. Set some commonsense goals for your cow herd that will enable you to produce quality calves as efficiently as possible. In most commercial cow-calf herds this can best be accomplished through a planned program of crossbreeding. Moderate-size cows which reproduce efficiently in your environment. In my opinion breed complementarity and heterosis are the biggest things that are frequently missing from our commercial breeding programs.