Every fall, preg-checking day gives us a grade on how well the herd performed. Getting straight A’s feels pretty good, but sometimes the cows that don’t make the grade teach us the most.

I thought when I graduated from college I was finally done worrying about report cards, but apparently I was wrong. Every fall, preg-checking day rolls around and I find myself hoping for straight A’s all over again.

The work itself is actually pretty simple and, when things are going well, it can feel easy. Each cow comes through the chute where she is checked either with an ultrasound or palpated to determine if she is pregnant and approximately how far along she is. We run a lot of cattle through the chute, but I still feel the “preg” or “open” of every one. Every cow matters, and even though I’m out of school, I still want a good grade with every one.

Ideally, we want to hear that our cows are three to four months pregnant if we are checking in early fall. Two to two-and-a-half months pregnant is okay, but that is starting to wander into short-bred territory. Those cows stretch our calving season later into branding and turnout, and their calves are younger and usually smaller when it comes time to ship in the fall. Anything shorter bred than that is late enough that we start having serious thoughts about culling her, even though she is pregnant.

When the cows are bred up early and everything is falling into that happy window, preg checking feels pretty easy. A cow that has bred back on time means she was healthy and in good enough condition to begin cycling and conceive again while she was still raising this year’s calf.

It’s when we don’t get the results we want that things start getting complicated.

I like getting straight A’s, so every cow that comes up open feels a little like a mark against our ranching grade. It’s especially disappointing when it’s a young cow that should have the potential to raise a lot more calves, one we recently bought and had high hopes for, or even just one of our favorite cows that we really wanted to keep around.

After the initial disappointment, though, we have to start asking why. Was she healthy? Was there enough feed? Did she struggle to start cycling again after calving or simply fail to catch during the first rounds of breeding? Were the bulls healthy and sound enough to travel, detect cows in heat and cover them?

Sometimes there isn’t much to learn from one open cow, but when we start seeing trends within a group of cattle, we pay attention.

The cows that have raised their first calves and are being bred for their second, for example, are often the group where we expect to find the most late-bred and open cows. They are still growing themselves while also lactating to raise a calf and trying to conceive again. All of those things require energy, and their bodies will prioritize growing and raising that calf over reproduction.

If we see too many of those young cows coming up late or open, we have to wonder whether their nutrition was sufficient. If we’re seeing the same number of late and open cows regardless of age, we might start looking more closely at the bull instead. An injury, poor condition or another problem could have kept him from adequately covering his group of cows.

That’s where our preg-checking report card becomes useful. Getting a grade we don’t like isn’t fun, but figuring out why we got it gives us a chance to make changes in the future.

We also take advantage of having every cow in the chute to do a little extra credit in hopes of making the upcoming calving season go a little smoother. Pregnant cows receive a vaccination to help protect against reproductive diseases that could cause them to lose their calves. We mark them with hair bleach according to how far along they are, making it easier to sort the heavies from the later-calving cows when we need to. We also double-check that their EID and visual tags are still present and intact so, when it matters, we know exactly who we’re dealing with.

None of it can change the grade we got that day, but hopefully it helps us do a little better with what comes next.

By the end of the day, we know which cows are pregnant, which ones aren’t and approximately when we can expect each of them to calve. More importantly, we’ve had a chance to look at how the herd performed and whether there are things we need to do differently next year.

Of course, getting the report card is only part of it. Once we know which cows didn’t quite make the grade, we have to decide what to do with them.

And apparently graduating doesn’t get me out of that homework either