Calving by the Numbers
By Steve Campbell
A friend told me the other day that he looked forward to calving season less each year. Mainly it was his having to get up to check on the animals around the clock. This made me think about nature and wonder who gets up to make sure all of the elk and deer are able to have their offspring. In the rare case that one of these females has a problem, nature takes its course, and she does not have a chance to pass those “unsuitable” traits along to any further progeny. This past winter (2013) a young man in the upper mid-west said they routinely pull 30% of their calf crop. On their farm, mother-nature was screaming “You are choosing the wrong cows” yet they were continuing to use EPD’s and University research to choose replacement heifers. I say it is time for a new (OLD) paradigm.
In nature, bugs are the clean-up crew to get rid of the plants that are not fit for man-nor-beast. Man comes along and uses chemical warfare agents to keep the bugs from eating the low-nutrient food in his field and then he sells that harvested feed to the middleman who advertises it to us as “new and improved.”
What we are doing in our cow herds is no different than this bug analogy if we continue to retain animals that cannot have offspring on their own. I suggest we go ahead and pull that calf, and when it is time to wean the calf, both mother and any related offspring should be removed from the herd.
If cow or a heifer is able to have a calf on her own in nature, it should be our goal to have it take place on our farm. How do we go about selecting for heifers and cows that will calve on their own? The very first place to start is in the shape and width of the rump of the female. A heifer or a cow that has a rump two and one-half inches wider than it is long--or wider--will rarely have calving issues. If she is wider than this, it only makes calving easier. If her pin bones are spaced wide apart, it is an indication of the width of the pelvic area (her mouth will have a similar width). Instead of a high tail-head, we are looking for one where the hook bones are level with the backbone and slopes down 3-4” to the pin bones. This rounding of the rump from hook bones and down keeps the calf from having to travel as high and not making quite as sharp a turn during birth. A small diameter tail takes up less of the pelvic opening. All of these traits make calving easier.
A heifer that has matured in size and has good glandular function will be able to devote more of her pregnancy to the development of the fetus with her intra-uterine environment and less time completing her own growth. Dr Weston A. Price stated that animals and humans can extract only about 50% of the vitamins and minerals contained in their food. At times of stress--pregnancy, fight or flight situations, weather, etc.--we have to double the intake of nutrients to replace those being used by the body.
Anothe tool in that OLD tool box is to fully develop the rumen of the calf by allowing her to nurse at mother’s side for 10-11 months will allow her to do two things: mature at an earlier age because she is digesting 65-70% of everything she eats, and she will require a lower percentage of her mature body weight for maintenance for the next ten or more years in your herd. Remember, a pregnant cow will wean her previous calf four to six weeks before giving birth again. What dollar value can you place on your cows eating 10-15% less every year?
Dr. Edward Howell has been able to show that if we use up our enzymes in a stress-filled life, including eating low-quality food, diseases of opportunity will befall us earlier in life. If we want that cow to stay in our herd until she is 12 to15 years old, we have to be good herdsmen, making sure she is looked after in a manner that reduces the stress and increases the nutrition she receives, along with maintaining the economic feasibility of the ranch, the farm and ourselves.
High-quality nutrition is vitally important not only to the cow, but also to her calf. At a minimum this high-quality food needs to be in the bull’s and cow’s system for at least 120 days before calving. The reason 120 days is a “magic” number is because that is how long it takes to change out all of the red blood cells in an animal’s body. The quality of sperm cells from the bull and egg cells from the cow have certain genetic potentials, which can only be passed along in their purest form if we nourish our animals well enough to do so.
The highest-quality feed on our farms starts when the grass greens up and begins growing in the spring. If that is May first in your locale, 120 days later will be approximately There is a time at every zip code when the Potassium is at the highest. Potassium helps to prevent dystocia.
Recently, I heard a cowboy in Wyoming say you should put your bulls in when the native grasses in your area are going to seed. There is Manganese in the seeds of plants and Manganese is need for reproduction. This makes a lot of sense regarding when those calves would be hitting the ground and the higher Potassium levels in the grass.
We can’t leave that cow without determining her ideal adult size. Every environment is different; however, one thing that can be said is that the smaller a cow is, up to a point, the more efficient she is. A frame 3.5 cow that weighs 950 pounds in Nevada may weigh as much as 1150 pounds in irrigated pasture. Ease of grazing will vastly change the “fighting weight” of any cow. What we are looking for here is a cow that weans a higher percentage of her body weight, each and every year, with the least input cost. One hundred 1000 pound cows will wean more total pounds than seventy-two 1400 pound cows. The reason is that as a cow goes up in weight, the percentage of her weight she weans decreases.
Ideally, we need cows of such a phenotype that their body condition score (BCS) is still adequate after 10 months of lactation. The cow that has a big belly, wide-butt and slope from hooks down to pins, with the high butterfat and glandular-function indicators, and can nourish her calf for 10 months which will contribute to the development of that calf’s rumen to its fullest potential. The only reason to wean a calf, in my opinion, is to allow time for the cow to achieve the proper BCS prior to calving. If the cow is not calving in sync with nature, we have to feed very expensive stored forage and supplements to maintain her. Dick Diven says, “When day length is short, a cow must have a much higher BCS (for rebreeding) than when the day is long…. Further, even when calving on a day of long photoperiod, the farther North the ranch is located, the higher the BCS must be.” If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, we will be weaning her calf earlier to keep the cow in a higher BCS and feeding costly inputs to do so. We are losing on both ends of the stick. Using a few weeks of your highest-quality grass forage in the spring to achieve the proper BCS makes it much less expensive.
What should genetic potential look like phenotypically when we are selecting a bull? Wide shoulders on bulls put wide rumps on females. Remember, the wider the rump is on the female, the easier time she will have at calving. At a minimum, the shoulders of the bull should be 2 inches wider than the rump length at one-year of age. If we choose masculine, prepotent bulls, our calves will be born closer to their father’s birth weight and length of gestation. A crossbred or out-crossed bull will not have offspring as consistent in size, quality and gestation as a line-bred bull.
Pedigree and the uniformity of the breeder’s herd will be two of the main indicators to use to find a pre-potent bull. High-breeding is sometimes used synonymously with close-breeding, but it more properly signifies a rigorous selection of breeding stock with reference to a definite standard and within the limits of a particular family. We cannot let those be our only ruler. The size of the “factory”(testicles) is of utmost importance. James Drayson, in his book Herd Bull Fertility, says you can somewhat know how long your breeding season is going to take by measuring the bull’s testicles, starting as early as 7 ½ months of age. The charts in his book show that length is just as important as the circumference because the combination of the two measurements will give us the total volume of the “factory.” Very few bulls born in America today fit into his optimal category.
Now that we have a well nourished “factory,” what can we expect? Bulls collected off a diet comprised exclusively of forage always have higher live sperm counts and lower abnormals than grain-fed bulls. Cows that look like they are “walking down-hill on level ground’ do so because of high estrogen production. A higher percentage of our females should get pregnant within a shorter breeding season under these two conditions. Culling open cows that have had a 45-day exposure to pre-potent bulls rapidly increases herd fertility. A shorter calving season would, in and of itself, make my friend happier, let alone the thought of not having to pull as many calves.
What goal do we have in mind for the finished product of our cow’s offspring? Are we looking for an animal that will produce gourmet grass-finished beef? If we are, we need to be selecting for quality and quantity indicators in the bulls and females we put into our herd. A cow having an unusually small front cannon bone, both in length and diameter; a pointed poll; a clean hock; an adrenal hair whorl placed in her shoulder area or forward; a uniform, shiny hair-coat; a gentle disposition; and the indicators for high butterfat will provide us with gourmet beef. Speaking of butterfat and milk, A2 milk is natures natural feed for all young mammalian offspring. Of all the mammals that have been tested for A2 milk--sheep, goat, camel, yak, water buffalo, bovines and humans are all double positive for A2. Bovines are the only mammals that don’t always test positive for A2 milk. Breeds of cattle that have not been “messed with” will have a much higher probability of testing positive. Holsteins will probably have the smallest percentage, as they have been bred for quantity instead of quality for a long time. The Aisle of Guernsey closed its shores to the importation of other breeds in 1798 and as a result, they have the highest probability of testing positive. Have you ever heard that goat milk is easier for humans to digest than cow’s milk? I speculate that, everything else being equal, it is the A2 qualities of the milk that makes this difference.
Volume of meat in this gourmet animal will be influenced by rump length, rump width and heart girth. For every inch the animal’s girth exceeds his top line measurement, we add thirty-seven pounds of gain and it takes thirty-seven fewer pounds of grain to do so. (For more information on this subject go to http://www.bovineengineering.com/linear.html )
Well, this may not have been algebra or trigonometry, but a close look at the numbers by which we select, run and breed or animals will allow us to begin to make the kind of changes which will make calving season more enjoyable and profitable. When a person starts to think about all of the blessings that come with calving in sync with nature, it becomes obvious why the wild animals have few problems.
1 Milch Cows, Guenon, Orange Judd Company, 1913