Benefits of a Managed Breeding Season

Many producers are already in the process of making decisions about this year's breeding season. These decisions include things such as about what bulls to use on which cows or how early should I turn in my bulls for breeding(or when to artificially inseminate). A producer must make a choice on all these decisions while keeping in mind how this might effect the future of his farm and herd. According to Brent Plugge , an Extension Educator from the University of Nebraska, controlling the breeding and the subsequent calving season can provide many benefits to a producer. These benefits include:

• Shortened calving season provides producers a better opportunity to offer improved management and observation of the cow herd(results in fewer losses at calving)
• Shortened calving periods also facilitates improvements in herd health and management through uniformity in timing of vaccinations and routine management practices(results decreased labor requirements)
• Cow nutrition can be improved by grouping cows according to stage of gestation and feeding each group accordingly
• Calf crop will be more uniform in age and size

The article goes on to tell us calves born in the first 21 days of the calving season had greater carcass weights, marbling scores, and yield grades than later born calves. Since this is a lot of information to distill at one time I am going to explain to you the point they are trying to make with the given information.

Cow and Calves

The first couple points talk about a shortened calving season(which is a direct result of management decision made in the breeding season) can result in fewer losses at calving and decreased labor requirements. This is a result of a shorter calving season because with your calving season being in a certain time frame you will know when to go check your cows versus someone who has a long calving season and eventually quits checking them due to other priorities. This can also result in reduced labor requirements because you know once your done calving you won't be spending those late nights and long days out there living with your cattle to insure all goes well and your calves will all have their vaccinations at once versus a long calving season where some may get their first vaccine in the spring and others that are born later would have to be brought in sometime after they are born to get their first vaccines.

The final three points talk about sorting cattle up according to when they are going to calve and this is basically to provide them with the proper nutrition before they calve and the calf crop will be more uniform in age and size because they were all born around the same time and have similar growth traits. The last part talks about how earlier born calves do better overall than later born calves which doesn't surprise me at all. Typically, your greater quality cows will calve in the first cycle every year so genetics would tell us the calves out of these cows will perform better than calves out of cows who don't conceive until their second or even third cycle. Overall, I believe producers should take time out of their schedule to construct a game plan for the upcoming breeding season so once it arrives they are able to take action and follow something they have put some time into.