Retaining Heifers

Scott, it's that time of year where we're all gathering cattle, and we're making decisions on what we're going to do with them, whether they're going to go to the sale barn, whether we're going to retain ownership.

What we're going to do with those females becomes one of them, and for a large number of our cooperators out here who see bred heifers selling for $5,000, um, they're thinking that, "Maybe I can keep my own replacements and get those cows in a more functional status," as they want to expand their beef herd.

So thinking about selecting replacement heifers this time of year is something that comes across most of our producers' minds, and I think there's some important things in terms of what we need to do to look at and select those replacement heifers.

Right.

So, you know, kind of the good old basic cattleman days of let's go out and let's...

We need 10 heifers, let's find our ti- 10 biggest, fleshiest doing girls that are out there, and that's the heifers we're gonna replace.

But now we've got a lot more information that can be used, and so it's not just go out and find your 10 growthiest heifers that you've got.

So what do we need to be thinking about? What do producers need to be thinking about? What tools can they be using to make better selections to build their herd and keep improving their herd?

Well, the first thing I think we need to do is let's open up that red book or that calving book that we have, and let's take a look at actually how old these animals are for their size.

Because we know that age of puberty leads to early conception when we're breeding heifers, and those heifers that conceive early tend to stay in our environments longer, and they're probably from genetics and lines of cows that tend to conceive early.

So I think opening our red books and saying, "Wow, start calving in mid-March, and I wanna be done by April.

Why am I keeping that big heifer that grows well at the end of the season that might be an additional frame size bigger than the rest of mine because she's a month and a half behind the early calved heifers? She looks good.

Maybe mom calved a little closer to green grass, and maybe she just had a little bit, uh, of a genetics from our cross-breeding program that show through.

Maybe she's not the ideal." So the first thing I'd do is look for those early-born front-end heifers that were calved in the front end of our calving season.

If our program's working, we're hoping that maybe that's gives us 70 or 75% of our heifers to pick through, first of all.

So what you're talking about, Travis, is what I used to see in these purebred catalogs when I'd sometimes be looking for purebred heifers to buy what they call contemporary groups.

You know, these bigger ranches that were, you know, had 500, 600 head of cattle to, to look through.

You know, they'd take all the calves that were born within a week of each other, and that would make a good contemporary group of 50 to 75 head.

How did they compare to the others in the contemporary group? Is, is that something that you're kind of equating it to?

Absolutely.

I think that's what we're looking at.

You know those heifers that conceive in the first 21 days of initial breeding season, they calve earlier, they have more time postpartum to recover.

It's important to get those cattle that have high fertility and breed early because that is the foundation of our longevity of our cow herd.

Cows that come in bred and stay that way, and ca- giving those particularly first calf heifers in our Eastern Colorado environment maybe an extra 20 to 25 days before we come back and put them in the herd.

A late calving first calf heifer is one that's probably gonna start falling out of our herd.