Early Weaning Calves

We had some people asking us about this with the possibility of drought conditions for the summer, and what we can really do and is, what are the advantages to doing some early weaning.

So Travis, let's start out.

Why don't you- let's talk about early weaning.

When w- w- when and why would we do early weaning?

Well, let's talk about the why.

There, there may be a variety of reasons, right? But the one that we're focused on right now as we do this here in 2026 is we're so dry.

Um, we're, we're looking at that point and we're trying to figure out, how do we get cows through the summer? Um, where are we gonna go with cows to grass? And, and our forage resources looks to be limited as we go forward into this summer if we don't get some rain here right away.

So one of the things that always comes up at that time is early weaning and what the advantages are.

And I think there's a couple advantages and a couple of reasons that we might early wean some calves.

You know, maybe it's our first calf heifers and we're worried about those re-breeding, and we're going to look at weaning them at a time when those heifers can get re-bred and going forward.

So if you've calved ahead of the rest of your cow herd, you're gonna be trying to breed those cows at 100 to 120 days, um, post-calving when we come back to get them in cycle with the rest of your herd.

So you might wanna wean, early wean those heifers in.

You know, some of our neighbors to the north at the University of Nebraska looked at some information and they, they're weaning calves as early as 45 to 80 days.

Now, we may not be looking that early, but you know, a calf at 80 to 100 days is changing his digestive tract, and we may have the opportunity to wean him.

So I think there's some things to think about there in terms of stretching our forage resources, making sure that our cows are bred up on time, making sure that this early weaning is taking place in a, in a fashion that's good for the calf.

And if we're going to have to supplemental feed, it's much easier to put that higher quality supplemental feed into a lighter weight calf and continue to get it to gr- gain than it is to try to put it into a cow and then have her transfer it forward to the calf.

Right, 'cause, you know, we're talking these calves, we kind of estimate that somewhere around two pounds a day of gain.

So at 100 pounds, if they started at, say, 75, we're up to 275.

The big thing is they've been out hopefully getting those proper ruminant microbes into their system from nursing off mom as well as eating with the rest of the herd and picking those things up from the environment and growing that population, 'cause basic nutrition, Ruminant Nutrition 101 is we're not feeding the animal, we're feeding the bugs, right? We're feeding the microbes.

And so we've gotta have those in place before we can really think about taking them completely in a, away from mom and milk and that high, high percentage, high concentrate that, that she can provide.