It is that time of year again: Spring Calving season. Calving season can be one of the busiest times of year for cattle producers. Along with being busy it is also one of the most important times of the year.
What happens during this time can have an impact on the overall health and performance of your calves. The steps that you take here can be the difference between an increased profit or just another year of barely getting by. So it is important that you do calving season right.
With everything that you will have going on there are many things that can go wrong. So I’ve compiled a list of 5 things that you can do to help ease some of the stress that comes with this season.
Having the right replacement heifers is important for long term profitability of any ranch. It is necessary to be able to rotate the breeding stock out to improve the overall genetic pool. Also cows will get to a point that they will get to be too old to breed any more. When this happens you will need to have new stock to take their place.
Feed costs remain the single largest expense for any cattle producer. This expense can easily be half of the total annual expenses for a rancher.
Having a good summer pasture management plan in place can save you a lot of headaches later on. It will give you a chance to put out any potential fires, not literally, before they can occur.
Breeding season preparations is a very important task for a cow/calf producer’s bottom line. The steps that they take now will determine if they will have a good calf crop or not. Having good quality calves to sell is the defining factor between a successful and a not successful rancher.
Trying to control flies that are on your cattle can be a very frustrating endeavor to say the least. It can often feel like an uphill climb with no rest in sight. No matter what you seem to do they just keep coming back year after year.
Using a hay bale to supplement your cattle is a tried and true method that many producers use. It is reasonably priced compared to other feedstuffs. Though just like other feedstuffs the quality can vary depending on many different factors.
Perhaps it has been a dream of yours to start ranching. You want to be able to wake up in the morning and see cows grazing in a pasture. You could also want to raise a family in more wide open spaces.
There is one constant in the livestock industry, if you have animals then you will have to build fencing. Fencing is a barrier to both keep your animals where you want them and to keep predators out.
As anyone in the cattle production sector can tell you raising cattle can be a very complex system. There are many different factors that come into play and if there is one thing that goes wrong it can cause problems.
