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calves on cows all winter

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LazyWP

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I was looking through the latest BEEF magazine last night, and there is an article about running the calves on the cows all winter. Praising how well the calves did and all that. My question is... would your feed cost be more? and is anyone on here doing it?
I think I am pretty open minded when it comes to "new" things, but I don't see this working as well as its touted.
 
How did the cows do? Did they breed back? Fall calving does that, but requires lost of feed. Where?? Never an end to new ideas, some are good; some, not so much. I don't think that would work here. I'll bet most of thase calves got kicked off anyway.
 
As Baxter Black says about coffee shop philosophers:

"It is easy to be an expert if you don't have to stay and clean up the mess. Anyone can make recommendations if you don't have to be responsible for the results. College professors, columnists and show ring judges start a lot of things other people have to finish."
 
It can work if you have the right calving season and the right kind of cow. A lot of those calves will already be weaned by spring. The Holstein look-alikes that have been popular aren't the right kind of cow.

There also has been some research done showing replacement heifers raised this way make better brood cows because they learn from their mothers how to make a living during the winter.
 
A person needs to know more before making a judgment/comment. Leaving the calves on spring calving cows would be a disaster, IMHO.

There is a fellow near here that has been leaving the calves on the cows til
February. He has been calving in May, but the June calves don't amount to much, so he is backing his calving up to mid April. I would think he would
need to wean the calves before February. Cows HAVE to have a rest
to perform like we expect in this day and age. Interesting that he had more dries than usual this year.

As for cows weaning their calves; we had a neighbor who was an older gentleman. He didn't always get all his calves weaned. He had some cows with bad bags and he would have old calves born the year before, sucking the cow along with the newborn calf. He said it saved him having to milk
those bad bagged cows out. :roll: So to each his own.

Research shows that breed back begins BEFORE the cow calves. Not
giving her a rest would show up in conception rates, I would think.
Seems to me that you can rob a cow for a year or maybe two, but soon
she is going to pay you back by not conceiving on time.

If you think that running the heifers with their mothers during the winter makes better cows out of them, wouldn't you do the cow (the factory) a better deal by weaning the calves first, THEN turning them back
with the cows? We just always kept the heifer calves separate. They have such small mouths compared to a cow, that we wanted to make sure they
got enough groceries to allow them to grow and reach puberty. We just
fed them hay and mineral, no grain, so they got treated like the rest of the
cows, it was just they didn't have to compete with those big-mouthed cows for feed. When we weaned them, we did leave a few cows with them to teach them how to eat.

FWIW (and I totally agree with Soapweed's post).
 
You better have great feed if you want them to gain. Money would be better spent weaning the calves and feeding them a ration letting the cows be cows. Some guys do it here fall calveing and they do wean decent calves but they feed them like dairy cows.
 
Faster horses said:
He had some cows with bad bags and he would have old calves born the year before, sucking the cow along with the newborn calf. He said it saved him having to milk
those bad bagged cows out. :roll: ).
Click to expand...

:shock: That sounds like he qualified for manager of the year :lol:.
 
WyomingRancher said:
Faster horses said:
He had some cows with bad bags and he would have old calves born the year before, sucking the cow along with the newborn calf. He said it saved him having to milk
those bad bagged cows out. :roll: ).
Click to expand...

:shock: That sounds like he qualified for manager of the year :lol:.
Click to expand...

Well, he thought it worked for him. :P Perception is everything, you know. :D

In his defense, he was old and he loved his cows. Heck, I can remember seeing him in a pasture in the spring (and more than once) with one of those old cows and he was milking her out right there. :shock: No fence or anything! He was such a dandy fellow, we all loved him.

Would we run those kind of cows. Never!!!
 
told about a guy had a ranch eastern Wyoming ,lived in town , sold yearlings would leave the calves with the cows in Mach he ride thru and ship any cow that was still nursing. :shock: in the fall ship the yearlings not much management at all.
 
Don't think it would work around here.I calve late April thru May. I wean by the middle of October. It gives my cows a chance to recover and put on some weight before winter sets in, I have had cows graze the winter up in the badlands where there is plenty of grass, natural shelter and flowing water.
I have seen calves left with cows out grazing in this country and it's not pretty. steers with water belly and thin cows that are tough to winter.
Might work in Florida.
 
Bought a couple pregnant 3-yr. old fall cows in Sept. for $1600 each. They calved in 2 weeks after the purchase so, bingo, right away they got cheaper. I'm going to run them over and make spring calvers out of them so there will be 6 months of free sledding for the cows. Calves will have to battle the winter on their mothers on corn stalks. Be interesting to see how they do. Right after the purchase I thought I was dumb for having to go 6 months to switch 'em to spring cows. Looks pretty smart now since the run-up in cow prices in 2 months. :tiphat: Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. :roll:
 
The lady in the article said they feed lactating cows CRP hay. My question is what are they supplementing with CRP in this country even if cut early is fair feed at best. And I know we all manage differently, but if you have to feed your cows better along with there calves is it really saving feed/money?
 
On the other hand, I have done some fall calving in the past, starting to calve August 10th for fifty days. I have done this two ways. One method is to wean early, feed the calves well, and rough the cows through the winter. The other way (which I prefer) is to feed the cows and their calves hay all winter, leave the calves on the cows through the summer, and sell the calves right off the cow about a month before the cows start calving again. The fall calves weigh a lot more by sucking their mothers, being on both milk and grass. The other advantage is that the fall calving cow doesn't get obese like they tend to do when running dry all summer. This system works great with fall calvers, but I wouldn't want to do it with a spring herd.

Our system for the past several years is to calve only in the spring. Any nice young cows that come up open in the fall get bulls turned with them about the first of November. We take pretty good care of them until the bulls are taken out in late December, and then the cows are turned out on left-over summer pasture, having all the water, salt, mineral, soapweeds, and fresh air that they need. Pregnant fall calving cows are sold in June, and they are usually a fairly valuable commodity at that time.
 
I usually have 10 or so long ears that are born on the mountain. They are to young to wean in the fall with the big bunch of calves so I leave them on their mothers and feed them good through the winter. Wean them along about the end of March then run the calves in my pasture through the summer and sell them in the fall. Steers averaged 900lbs. Heifers averaged 775lbs. this year. It's a nice early fall check.
 
We are seeing more of this in our area all the time. Many older guys are calving later - May/June/July and are leaving calves on cows but supplementing either with creep feed for the calves or putting the whole works on standing corn for grazing. I think they are looking at the calves being too small to really cash flow in the fall, and avoiding the extra work of calving in the winter on one end and feeding calves on the other. Many are very good managers that I really respect and they make out pretty well.
We calve late and wean early on the belief that we need to get some bark on our cows before winter, and that feed is best spent going into a growing class of livestock, but wintering calves on cows does work for several neighbours. I would also be interested to see what rebreeding rates are.
 
We did it for 4 years at our Alberta place. We calve from mid-May to July 1st, and we had the grass to ensure we were rotating cows throughout the fall to keep them gaining and in good shape going into winter. We were mostly grazing stockpiled native for the winters, in river hills, canyons and coulees where there was plenty of tree cover and certainly not the winds that Big Muddy or other folks get. When it dropped real cold we moved the girls closer to home onto paddocks filled with bales we had spaced out for bale grazing. One winter we also swath grazed them on an oat-barley mix.

This worked really well for the first 3 years. The winters were mild, meaning it hit -40 a few times, but didn't stay that way for more than a day or two. The cows lost some weight, but never got thin. The calves still gained over a pound a day on average and we weaned them mid-March to give the cows 2 months off before calving again. My Grandfathers both told me not to get to cocky about my system because one of these years I was going to get an old fashioned winter that would put a stop to it all. The 4th winter was that winter. 2-3 feet of snow on the level. We had most of the winter's feed in swath grazing, buried, and even the horses got tired of pawing through for it. The cows would follow them, waiting for the horses to open up swaths, but when horses rub the hair off the backs of their legs they just quit. We rented 4-wheel drive tractors with blades and cleared snow off of swaths and did all sorts of things to get through, including buying hay in the middle of winter at peak prices. Bottom line, that winter cost us more in feed and labor than the previous 3 combined. Our cows were rough by spring and calves didn't gain a thing.

So from a cost perspective it's a hit and miss in my opinion. It may work for some, not for others depending on your ranch and management resources. It does definitely have other benefits. The claims of heifers being better mothers and grazers has proven true in our herd. The girls that were on their Mommas for 10 months are the last ones to bawl for feed when the going gets tough, and when the first snow comes they drop their heads and eat it for water without hesitation.

It's no different than any other management change a person makes-you have to gauge the results and decide for yourself. If you want to stick with it there will be cows who don't do well and you have to decide to either feed them more or sell them. You have to look at possibly changing minerals or supplements depending on the feed value offered to the cows, etc, etc.

We've done it now for 6 years in total and this winter in a milder climate in BC I'm looking forward to seeing the results.
 
If you put any stock in the fetal programming idea where if a pregnant cow loses a substantial amount of weight during her pregnancy the calf loses the ability to grade choice because the fat cells don't develop in the muscle of the calf, then late weaning would be a bad idea.

Personally, I think feed is more efficiently used to put weight on weaned calves than to feed the cow to produce milk to put weight on the calf. Besides I don't like to see skinny cows at any time of year. Skinny cows don't fare well in tough storms or tough winters.
 

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