Soapweed, what do you base your keep/cull desicions on?
Mostly eye appeal.
Does body type play any sort of role or do you go strictly on performance?
The big horsey ones I don't keep, and the little insignificant poorer quality ones get to hit the road.
Did I read somehwere that you pretty much keep all the bred cows?
Usually if a cow is bred and has all her teeth she gets to stay. If she has a noticeably poor calf, or has a poor attitude, bad bag, eye trouble, etc. she doesn't get to hang around. In the spring of the year, if we lose a calf out of a nice young cow, we'll rob a calf out of an older blemished type cow to graft onto the young cow. The other cow gets sold after she has had a chance to go dry for about three weeks.
If so, how do you choose which heifers to keep back?
I like to sort replacement heifers while they are still sucking their mothers. We put a herd of cows with their calves into a fence corner, and do our sorting horseback, one pair at a time. Eye appeal is the single most used factor in our decisions. We can also tell by the top number of the calf's ear tag the chronological order in which it came. Each calf should be the right size for the time period in which it was born. This becomes part of the criterion for the selection process.