She’s Got One More Good Year in Her

The decisions behind who stays in the herd and who makes the cull list.

There is one thing we can always be sure about come fall cattle work– there are cows we know won’t be spending another year on our ranch. The funny thing is, we don’t necessarily know how many there will be or exactly who they are until we start working through the list. After weaning the calves and before we put too much labor and cost into the upcoming year’s calf crop, it’s the right time to decide which cows measure up and which ones make the cull sheet.

The preg checking verdict usually makes the first cut for us. If a mature cow comes through the chute open, she is almost always headed down the road. If she isn’t carrying a calf that we can sell next year, it’s pretty hard to justify feeding her for another year. We lose the income from the calf she won’t raise while still paying the costs of feed, vaccinations, medications and everything else that goes into keeping her.

Because no rule is ever black and white, even that one has exceptions. We tend to give a young cow that has just raised her first calf a little more grace. To her credit, she has been trying to grow herself, produce milk for a calf and become pregnant again all at the same time. All of those demands can mean reproduction gets pushed down the priority list.

If we otherwise like her, her potential may be worth more to us than the cost of giving her another year. Replacing her isn’t free either, so we opt to gamble in favor of keeping her.

Those are the easy decisions. Okay, not easy, just easier. Once we’ve dealt with the opens, things get a little less black and white.

Every year is different. If preg checking leaves us with quite a few open cows to sell, some of the older cows we have been watching will get another year on our operation. We still need cows to fill the country we have available, and an old cow that is bred and still getting around might look pretty good when there are already plenty of holes to fill.

If nearly everything comes up pregnant, we can afford to be pickier.

That’s when we start looking harder at the cows that have accumulated a few marks against their names, not just the things we can see as we work them chute-side, but what we’ve noticed throughout the year whenever we lay eyes on them.

Maybe at calving we notice a cow with an engorged teat or an udder that isn’t holding up very well. That can make it harder for her calf to nurse and eventually show up in the calf’s health and growth. Maybe she’s getting old enough that her teeth are disappearing. Her nutrition is important, and if she can’t stay in good condition, our ranch might not be her place anymore. Maybe her hips or legs are beginning to break down, making us wonder how many more summers she can travel the range.

Or maybe she’s just a pain to deal with. Cows that are wild, jump fences or consistently create more work, and occasionally more dangerous situations, earn themselves a note too.

None of those things alone necessarily earns a cow a one-way ticket off the ranch. We’re pretty forgiving and patient. We might even be a little forgetful. But when we start reading through our notes and the same cow has collected several problems over the years, it gets harder to ignore them.

We also want to know that she actually raised the calf she was supposed to. As we wean, we pay attention to whether cows are still milking. If one is already dry, we make a note. Maybe she sloughed her calf. Maybe her calf died somewhere along the way. Maybe she abandoned it. One dry year doesn’t always tell us enough, but when the same cow shows up dry more than once, pregnancy alone isn’t enough to keep saving her. Getting bred doesn’t do us much good if she can’t put a healthy calf on the truck at the end of the year.

Sometimes the decision is as much about our ranch as it is about the cow. Our cattle need to be able to travel and forage on fairly rough range. A cow whose legs, hips or hooves are beginning to fail might still have several good years in an operation where she can spend the summer on irrigated pasture. We’d rather sell her while she’s healthy, mobile and still has value than wait until she reaches the point that she can’t get around at all.

Of course, knowing when we’ve reached that point isn’t always easy. We’re trying to run as many productive cows as we reasonably can, but there are bounds to how large our herd can be. We don’t have unlimited grazing permits, pasture or ground to produce winter feed. There is a ceiling on the number of cattle our resources can support, and ideally we want to use those resources as efficiently as possible.

We pay for our grazing permits whether we completely fill them or not. There are other costs around the ranch that don’t disappear just because we’re running fewer cows either. If we have the resources to support a cow, we want to have a productive cow there using them.

That’s probably why the cows sitting right on the edge are the hardest ones for us to sell. She may be old, but she’s bred. Her teeth aren’t great, but she made it through this summer. She’s caused us trouble before, but not lately. We know there is something waiting to replace her eventually, but we’re also pretty good at finding reasons she could make it one more year.

Late-bred cows create another headache. She’s pregnant, so it’s hard to call her unproductive, but she’s stretching our calving season later. Her calf will have fewer days to grow before we ship in the fall, and now we’re managing cattle at different stages longer than we really want to.

At some point we have to ask whether that calf is worth the added costs. And there isn’t always a right answer. Keep the cow and maybe she raises a great calf next year and makes us glad we gave her another chance. Or maybe her health declines, she comes up dry, or we spend another year’s worth of feed only to have the exact same conversation next fall. Sell her and maybe we’ve given up a cow that had several productive years left.

That’s what makes culling more complicated than simply sorting the good cows from the bad ones. The line moves a little every year depending on how the herd performed, how many cows we need to replace and what our resources can support.

Some cows make the decision for us. The rest leave us standing there looking at a list of numbers, trying to decide just how much another year is worth. When we really don’t know, we can always smile, nod our heads and say, “I’m sure she’s got one more good year in her.”

Or at least someone else can.  That’s about the time I’m glad I’m not the boss in charge of making all the hard decisions. I’ll just stick to the sure ones.