Do most ranches in texas keep bulls in year around? If so, why? Every cattle deal coming of the drought areas that i have seen or heard about seem to have a very spread out calving season or cattle bred from first to third trimester.
Up here where our ranch is located we pasture our bulls with our cows in the winter as we only have one place on the creek that springs up and stays free of ice for them to water in...it works great for us as we preg-test and ship our open girls, the bulls all calm down with all bred cows, and if one slinks, they help to let us know which cow it was! Once we start calving we pull the bulls out and they really put weight on after our long winter.eatbeef said:Do most ranches in texas keep bulls in year around? If so, why? Every cattle deal coming of the drought areas that i have seen or heard about seem to have a very spread out calving season or cattle bred from first to third trimester.
RSL said:We run a fairly short breeding season, but to pose a question, is a long calving season (year round) a management problem/issue or a marketing problem/issue.
If you had 1200 cows calving year round and shipped 100 calves a month things would cash flow pretty nicely and you would spread your market risk. I can see the need to make sure cows don't slip back too long on their interval, but you could also run fewer bulls per cow, etc.
It would not be fun if you had calving issues in your herd, but a relatively trouble free cowherd would be pretty slack.