What Are Real Beef Producers Up to on Their Farms? Updating Cow-Calf Management Benchmarks Across Canada

Dec 06, 2023

The Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC) is asking cow-calf producers to share insight into their on-farm management practices and production methods. The 2023 Canadian Cow-Calf Survey is an online questionnaire that will collect data to help understand trends in production practices and efficiencies over time.

The BCRC is an industry-funded council comprised of beef producers from across Canada. The council allocates a portion of the Canadian Beef Cattle Check-Off to advance research, extension, and innovation for beef and forage producers.

Collecting credible information directly from producers helps the BCRC identify research priorities and information gaps, develop provincial benchmarks, and examine changes over time that impact producers.

Your identity and information will remain anonymous. Individual results will remain in the strictest of confidence. Your information will be pooled with other respondents before being published in aggregate. Information collected will be subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

It will take approximately 30-60 minutes to complete the questions related to your 2023 calf crop. Participants can take breaks up to four hours before the session times out.

The last day to participate in the survey is March 31, 2024.

The first 200 producers to answer all of the questions are eligible to receive a BCRC toque and a pair of cotton gloves.

Results will be available on BeefResearch.ca in 2024. For more information on this survey, please contact info@beefresearch.ca

By clicking “Next” you are consenting to participate. If you want to withdraw from the survey, simply close your web browser without hitting “Submit.” Once you hit “Submit” your anonymous data cannot be withdrawn.

Before you start

Have on hand some important dates and numbers about your 2022 breeding season and 2023 calf crop including: number of head exposed (naturally or by AI), number of females that calved, females sold, kept for re-breeding, dead’s, date of first and last calf, percentage of calves in each 21 day window during the calving season, number of calves weaned, weaning weight, cow weight, and percentage of calves polled.

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Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.