Calving time begins beef cycle
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Spring is on its way when feed and ranch supply stores stock baby chickens, and calves dot feed grounds, napping on hay or awkwardly kicking up their heels as their mothers munch hay.
Ranching families who provide hay to keep their cattle fed are busy this time of year too, some rising several times a night to check heifers expecting their first calves. Veterinarians also work long hours during calving season. It’s a season for hollow eyes and sleep deprivation.
One of the sleepy ones, Beth Blevins, a veterinarian who operates All Creatures Mobile Clinic, said the task she’s done most this calving season is to start IVs on calves when they have the scours or diarrhea so they don’t dehydrate.
As far as bad weather for calving, Blevins said wet conditions with the wind blowing are the worst.
“The worst single condition you can have is wind,” Ronan rancher Ken McAlpine agreed.
If a calf is born on a windy, cold night, it’s hard for a little wet calf to get warmed up, even when the mother cow licks them off. McAlpine has an insulated room in a shed where he can put a chilled calf. A propane heater warms it up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in about an hour and a half. Leaving a calf in the shed for two hours will warm it right up; but if it’s really cold, he may leave the calf in the shed overnight.
“Calves are going from the inside of their mom, where’s it 100 to 102.5 degrees, to the temperature outside,” Blevins said.
Big calves can cause calving difficulties such as having to pull the calf or even a Caesarian section. McAlpine believes in preventing calving problems by using good moderate-framed black bulls as sires.
Cattle have a gestation period of 286 days, about nine and a half months, so most ranchers put their bulls out for breeding during May or early June.
Lifelong rancher and former president of the Wyoming Livestock Board Rob Orchard said when he’s buying bulls, he looks for a medium-framed bull that’s 55 to 58 inches at the hip with good bone but not too long-legged, which is beneficial since calves are sold by the pound.
“There’s very little weight from the bottom of their belly to the ground,” he noted.
Another factor is the birth weight of the bull, which is a predictor of the weight of the bull’s offspring.
“If you’re calving out in the hills and not babysitting your cows, you want a smaller calf,” Orchard said.
He likes to see 75-to 80-pound calves, not too big to make calving difficult, but not so small the little guys chill quickly.
“You want a yearling bull with a 16-to-17-inch rib eye,” Orchard said, because that can mean the difference between a carcass grading choice or prime. The rib eye is the longissimus muscle between the 12th and 13th rib of beef cattle.
Vets ultrasound sale bulls to figure out the size of their rib eye, Orchard said, and added that another tool for ranchers is the expected progeny differences, or EPD, rating, which provides an estimate of the genetic value of an animal as a parent.
Another issue during calving season is nutrition for the mother cows. If they are getting enough to eat, they give more milk for their babies.
McAlpine feeds their cows twice a day during calving season.
“Well, I think the cows utilize the hay a little better, plus it gives me another trip through the cows,” McAlpine said.
Taking another look at the cows gives him a chance to spot which cow might just be starting to calve or a new baby that needs an ear tag.
If ranchers don’t put up their own hay, they have to buy it to take their cows through the winter. There’s a good demand for hay this winter, McAlpine said. Good hay is going for $125 a ton for big round bales.
Blevins and McAlpine both run black Angus cows, and Orchard favors red Angus cows instead of the Hereford cows that used to be the most popular.
Herefords had horns that needed to be dealt with, Orchard said, as well as more cancer eyes, prolapsed uteruses, feet that couldn’t take the rocky country, and white udders that sunburned. McAlpine agreed and said black cattle also soak up radiant heat and are genetically pretty strong.
The number of cattle is down nationwide, which is good news for western cattle ranchers. Part of the lower numbers reflects a big sell-off of cattle in Texas, according to McAlpine, since there was a drought down there and a lot of ranches in Texas aren’t running cattle. With supply and demand, cows are worth more, and Montana and Wyoming are slowly seeing a herd-rebuilding phase. There’s also a trend for young people moving back to the ranch because there’s the possibility of making a decent living.
“It’s kind of a fun time to be in the cow business on a day like today,” McAlpine said, enjoying the beautiful day on March 8.
