• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

First year results of summer calving

One cold blizzardy day, March 11, 1988, we went out after dinner to find six calves all born while we were eating. It was cold and snowy so we hauled all six calves into our "mud room" entry to the house. Peach used the same towel to dry off all six calves. We will never do that again. :wink: The scent from all six calves all smelled the same. The mamma cows were quite confused when they were re-united with their calves, and we were never quite sure if the right calves ended up with the right cows or not.
 
Wyo Rancher is somewhat familiar with what we do here on the river but I would like to hear more comment on the scour issue. I have been calving here for 27 years and never had a real serious scour problem. We were winter calving at the time and when I started using the scourguard vaccine to the pregnant cows we almost totally stopped the scours. When we delayed our calving to April for one herd and July for another herd we thought we could do away with the scour vaccine in the July calvers. We were wrong. Our April calvers were vaccinated and had no problems. We started doctoring calves when our July cows started calving. We only lost one calf but we doctored about 20 in the first 100 calves born in July. The following year we also vaccinated our July cows and we never doctored a calf. We are in a intensive grazing system and moving cows to fresh pasture constantly so we are on clean ground most of the time. I would like to not vaccinate because it is expensive but if you save one calf you pay for a lot of vaccine. More comments?
 
gcreekrch said:
Grassfarmer, is there much difference in 205 day weight between early and later weaning?
Click to expand...

Don't know I've never actually weighed or calculated that but we calf from April 20 to the end of May - there are usually half a dozen stragglers in the first week of June and if we wean them all in Mid October all the June calves and a few of the late Mays are just too small to handle the cold. This winter we have separated off a small group and are giving them extra feed and shelter.
 
Soapweed said:
One cold blizzardy day, March 11, 1988, we went out after dinner to find six calves all born while we were eating. It was cold and snowy so we hauled all six calves into our "mud room" entry to the house. Peach used the same towel to dry off all six calves. We will never do that again. :wink: The scent from all six calves all smelled the same. The mamma cows were quite confused when they were re-united with their calves, and we were never quite sure if the right calves ended up with the right cows or not.
Click to expand...

When it gets cold here and the hotel starts filling up, we often start kicking cows out and keeping new calves in a holding area, leaving the other stalls for cows in labour or whose calves haven't got up yet. Because my memory is poor, and calves who room in tight quarters must tend to smell alike, I stick tags in the calves ears whether they are wet or not. Serial numbers tend to help avoid confusion have been my saving grace more than once.
 
Silver said:
Soapweed said:
One cold blizzardy day, March 11, 1988, we went out after dinner to find six calves all born while we were eating. It was cold and snowy so we hauled all six calves into our "mud room" entry to the house. Peach used the same towel to dry off all six calves. We will never do that again. :wink: The scent from all six calves all smelled the same. The mamma cows were quite confused when they were re-united with their calves, and we were never quite sure if the right calves ended up with the right cows or not.
Click to expand...

When it gets cold here and the hotel starts filling up, we often start kicking cows out and keeping new calves in a holding area, leaving the other stalls for cows in labour or whose calves haven't got up yet. Because my memory is poor, and calves who room in tight quarters must tend to smell alike, I stick tags in the calves ears whether they are wet or not. Serial numbers tend to help avoid confusion have been my saving grace more than once.
Click to expand...

I tag fairly soon after birth also but you guys just need some Hereford or whiteface Simmental influence and the calves are easier to tell apart. :wink: :P :D
 
gcreekrch said:
Silver said:
Soapweed said:
One cold blizzardy day, March 11, 1988, we went out after dinner to find six calves all born while we were eating. It was cold and snowy so we hauled all six calves into our "mud room" entry to the house. Peach used the same towel to dry off all six calves. We will never do that again. :wink: The scent from all six calves all smelled the same. The mamma cows were quite confused when they were re-united with their calves, and we were never quite sure if the right calves ended up with the right cows or not.
Click to expand...

When it gets cold here and the hotel starts filling up, we often start kicking cows out and keeping new calves in a holding area, leaving the other stalls for cows in labour or whose calves haven't got up yet. Because my memory is poor, and calves who room in tight quarters must tend to smell alike, I stick tags in the calves ears whether they are wet or not. Serial numbers tend to help avoid confusion have been my saving grace more than once.
Click to expand...

I tag fairly soon after birth also but you guys just need some Hereford or whiteface Simmental influence and the calves are easier to tell apart. :wink: :P :D
Click to expand...

Actually we do run some Simmie / Angus bulls, and we do get some 'herd markers', but in general the tan of the Blonde mothers seems to be fairly dominant. And with my short term memory they could be rainbow striped and I wouldn't necessarily remember who the mother was :?
 
We've found the 'mothering up' problem comes when cattle are in close
contact and can't get away from the other cows/calves.

The worse we had was a spring storm in Wyoming, the one we called the Good Friday storm that happened in April of 1973. It was a cow killer.
98 mph winds, lots of snow, drifts so high the kids could walk up on them and touch the telephone lines! I never want to go through anything like that again...anyhow, any new calves that were born we picked up and brought to the barn...and we had the same experience as Soapweed when
we put them back on the cows. Any cow that wanted a calf, got one, regardless of who's was who's. We didn't ear tag at that time. And that was when the 'Beef Boycott' was going on. Those women boycotting beef in supermarkets...it was very fustrating...and we were in the midst of that storm trying to mother up cows and calves. I guess it is something I will never forget. We lost our milk cow in that storm...Mr. FH had just finished milking and turned the cows out when the storm hit. It was not predicted.
The storm lasted 2 full days. We found the milk cows over by the creek bank, the big cow (Holstein shorthorn cross) had pushed the other cow (little Guernsey) off into the creek. She was alive when we found her and we took her to town to the Ford Garage, which was heated, hoping to save her, but she had just been too cold for too long. It was sad. Sheepmen in that area lost a lot of sheep, hundreds of sheep...whether
they had been sheared or not. A woman rancher over by Gillette had 1200 sheep in a shed that had been sheared, the wind behind the snow
sealed every crack in the shed and the sheep smothered. They said the sheep on the bottom were partially cooked from the heat of the sheep
that fell on top. She lost them all. They had to dig big trenches and bury them, the stench was terrible.
 
LaramieRiverWrangler said:
Wyo Rancher is somewhat familiar with what we do here on the river but I would like to hear more comment on the scour issue. I have been calving here for 27 years and never had a real serious scour problem. We were winter calving at the time and when I started using the scourguard vaccine to the pregnant cows we almost totally stopped the scours. When we delayed our calving to April for one herd and July for another herd we thought we could do away with the scour vaccine in the July calvers. We were wrong. Our April calvers were vaccinated and had no problems. We started doctoring calves when our July cows started calving. We only lost one calf but we doctored about 20 in the first 100 calves born in July. The following year we also vaccinated our July cows and we never doctored a calf. We are in a intensive grazing system and moving cows to fresh pasture constantly so we are on clean ground most of the time. I would like to not vaccinate because it is expensive but if you save one calf you pay for a lot of vaccine. More comments?
Click to expand...
What are the genetics of your cattle - specifically how big is the milk supply when they calf?
 
I would like to hear more too Laramie River. We used to have an E. coli problem where calves would get sick within 24 hours and be dead by the next day. That was back in the 70's and early 80's. We have used scour guard ever since and have all but eliminated any scours. Maybe treat 4 or 5 calves a year, no big deal. However, I don't want to have a problem either. It's not worth having a wreck.
 
Our due date is May 15 so we are a little bit later. We don't use scours vaccinations on the cows and haven't for years. When we used to have a "calving" pen and pasture we fought scours non-stop. Moving calving helped but it didn't fix the problem. It was only when we went to the Sandhills method of moving the heavies that we eliminated the scours issue all together. I didn't treat a single scours case this spring and it certainly wasn't because it wasn't wet. We had plenty of moisture through the calving season but because there wasn't new calves landing on dirty ground there was no problem with scours.

We still have chores to do with the blizzards that come through, but I sure do enjoy knowing that when I get my chores done I can go inside and put my feet up, drink coffee and read for the rest of the day if I want to. No more worrying about the calves dying of exposure within minutes of birth. I will quit ranching before I go back. I am a self-admitted wimp.

I am glad to hear that things worked out so well for you Big Swede. If you are anything like us you are probably setting around scratching your head trying to figure out why it took you so long to make the switch. After we started making the switch my grandpa, who was still living at the time, said that they used to calve in May, but then everyone started chasing weaning weights.
 
rancherfred said:
Our due date is May 15 so we are a little bit later. We don't use scours vaccinations on the cows and haven't for years. When we used to have a "calving" pen and pasture we fought scours non-stop. Moving calving helped but it didn't fix the problem. It was only when we went to the Sandhills method of moving the heavies that we eliminated the scours issue all together. I didn't treat a single scours case this spring and it certainly wasn't because it wasn't wet. We had plenty of moisture through the calving season but because there wasn't new calves landing on dirty ground there was no problem with scours.

We still have chores to do with the blizzards that come through, but I sure do enjoy knowing that when I get my chores done I can go inside and put my feet up, drink coffee and read for the rest of the day if I want to. No more worrying about the calves dying of exposure within minutes of birth. I will quit ranching before I go back. I am a self-admitted wimp.

I am glad to hear that things worked out so well for you Big Swede. If you are anything like us you are probably setting around scratching your head trying to figure out why it took you so long to make the switch. After we started making the switch my grandpa, who was still living at the time, said that they used to calve in May, but then everyone started chasing weaning weights.
Click to expand...

Rancherfred, I can certainly understand why you would go from early spring to late spring calving to make life easier. What baffles me though, is why you would jump from the frying pan right into the fire by starting to raise chickens. :???: :wink: Life is too short, and eggs aren't that tasty to want to do that. :-)
 
I quit the scourboss program 3 years ago. All I can say is we vaccinated the cow's for the first round 3 weeks ago and I will never skip it again. Mineral or not I'm staying on a scour program.I think our bug just hangs in the soil and when conditions are right it rears its ugly head and boom an epedemic.I kept moving my calveing dates back and all I ended up with was lighter calves and no less work. I'm moving them back up now.
 
Rancherfred, I can certainly understand why you would go from early spring to late spring calving to make life easier. What baffles me though, is why you would jump from the frying pan right into the fire by starting to raise chickens. :???: :wink: Life is too short, and eggs aren't that tasty to want to do that. :-)[/quote]

Have you been talking to my wife? That is about what she said when I brought them home. "You did what!!???" I just have so much free time on my hands now that I had to find something else to do so now instead of messing around with cattle during a blizzard I set in the chicken coop watching for eggs to drop.
 
  • Back on the scour issue. GrassFarmer, historically we have had a Gelbvieh herd but for the last several years we have used so much Angus genetics that we are only a quarter to a half GV now. We still have plenty of milk and calving on green grass certainly insures that the milk is there.
    I first thought it was a milk problem cause we had a lot of messy bottoms but we had to re-hydrate a few calves to save them and the scour boluses
    did the trick.
    It is great not having to fight the storms and those calves are up and running that first day. You have to be on top of your game to keep up with the ear tagging. I sure like it better than shed calving in below zero temps and constantly trying to save calves.
    You can save some on feed and those cows have time on spring grass during that last trimester to gain before calving.
 
I had good intentions of tagging all my calves last summer but what I found after a few days of getting 25 or 30 calves a day and trying to tag them was that all I was doing was causing trouble out in the calving pasture. I would take the 4 wheeler out and try to tag but even though those calves were less than a day old I would end up chasing them around enough to get the whole herd stirred up. I decided about the 26th of May that I was doing more harm than good so I quit tagging. The cows still knew who their calf was even without the tag. Imagine that! Sometimes we just need to get out of the way. The only disadvantage I found was that some cows when they are ready to calve with the water bag out and all, will start to claim another calf, drop theirs and leave it, and then you have an orphan calf that you don't know where it belongs. In a calving lot you can usually figure out who that calf belongs to but on pasture it's kind of hard to figure out. That happened to a couple calves last summer but if you catch them soon enough you can save them.

By the way Rancherfred, I want to thank you for your insight a couple years ago. A guy never thinks that a remark on an internet chat room would have such an affect on someone but when you retold your story about one storm you and your Dad went through it made me really sink in what I was doing and made me want to do something different. I can't give you all the credit though, I was ready to chart a different course, but your remarks were of great help. Thank you!
 
I try and get everything tagged at least for the first cycle-that catches the A'I calves after that we run a bunch of bulls so not sure what the sires are. Ty or I just long loop them off of horseback-then we tie them with a pigging string and go make up the tag-the cows usually go check their calves then stand around while we tag. we run our horses with our cows so they are pretty much bored with each other. You don't have to be real handy to rope a freshie but those week old calves in the bush can be fun.
 
rancherfred said:
Soapweed said:
Rancherfred, I can certainly understand why you would go from early spring to late spring calving to make life easier. What baffles me though, is why you would jump from the frying pan right into the fire by starting to raise chickens. :???: :wink: Life is too short, and eggs aren't that tasty to want to do that. :-)
Click to expand...

Have you been talking to my wife? That is about what she said when I brought them home. "You did what!!???" I just have so much free time on my hands now that I had to find something else to do so now instead of messing around with cattle during a blizzard I set in the chicken coop watching for eggs to drop.
Click to expand...

:-) :-) :-) Just don't let your gum fall out of your mouth. It is hard to find in a chicken coop. :wink: :-)
 
Our last two Buff Orpingtons cashed it in a couple winters ago-they just roamed where they wanted even in the winter-enough spilled oats and drank out the water bowl. They lived to be 7 or 8 years old if I remember right-one was even named Peaches. Soap you can tell your Mrs. she was a fine and noble bird. I'd like to get some more heritage breed chickens they are pretty interesting critters-one breed was used for killing mice..
 

Latest posts

Back
Top