Fall Calves

[Hoss]

How do people with fall calves manage them ? Such as weaning age,vaccinations,selling options.This is my situation had a bull go bad summer of 06 had 30 open cows out of 47 everybody I talked to told me to make fall calvers out of them so I did out of the 30 head 29 were bred to calf from 8-28-07 to11-1-07 and all 29 calved from 8-25-07 to 10-12-07. Around the 1ST of Dec of 07 I bouught 43 more pairs they were born in Oct & Nov of 07 they just a little younger than my own but they match up pretty good. I am located in south central Iowa .

 

[leanin' H]

Just do like you used to except for a little later in the year. We wean at about 7 or 8 months old. Instead of October you'd be lookin' at May and June. You'll vaccinate for scours 3 weeks or so before you start calving and work the calves as they get three or four months old. We have been keeping our calves as weaners and feeding them until Feb. to sell as 800 plus pound feeders. This year we got .94 cents on steer calves averaging 856 pounds. We did o.k. as prices dipped a little last fall and have come back a little. As a small producer I really believe in changing things up. Sell your calves as fat beef or look at being a seed stock producer or investigate calving in the fall and see if it doesn't help the bottom line? :???: If nothing else it'll take longer to go broke than the normal way! :lol: Good Luck!

 

[jigs]

problem with fall calving and running stalks is the cow takes so much to keep going that the calves seem to get shorted, and they get a stunted look to them. time wise, fall calving works well for me, but the draw backs have convinced me to go to a spring calving routine.....

 

[sw]

We wean our fall calves born in Sept/Oct the middle to the end of February, we just weaned a week ago. We have creep feed out for the calves from November on. After weaning, the requirements for the cows goes way down, that is why we wean early, put the feed resources into the calves instead of feeding the cows enough to provide enough milk for the calves. The cows can go back out and graze old grass instead of being fed hay every day. We use the same amount of hay now as we did when we calved in Feb/March. Our calves then go out on grass until late August, early September when they go into a feedlot. They then come out of the feedlot towards the end of February when there is a shortage of ready cattle so they usually bring a premium there. The advantages of fall calves are mostly options, if it does not rain I can sell them in April/May on the highest market of the year, or if it rains I keep them and grass them. We do not vaccinate for scours and we have not had a sick calf since we went to fall calving. Our weaning percentage is usually over 100% with twins. We run just as many cows as we did when we spring calved, and we do it with no hired help, just us so we are growing more pounds of beef with way less inputs and way less stress on us, we do not check even heifers at night or work even half as hard as we used to.