W
hen feed is short, ranchers often choose to reduce herd numbers rather than buy expensive hay, but there are ways to cull wisely. Sometimes there are several options and strategies that might help you get through the drought with the least negative impact on your herd genetics. Each ranch situation is unique, however, and what works for one operation may be less feasible for another. Travis Olson, at Ole Farms Athabasca, Alberta, says the general rule of thumb is to try to cull hardest or reduce numbers in the classes of cattle that won’t hurt you in the long term. “In our operation we take a lot of cattle to finish. In a drought situation, the first group to be gone is the yearling steers. Then we look at the cow herd. How you cull the cows may depend on when your breeding season is. If you are calving in March, and facing a drought that summer, you could ultrasound those cows 60 days into the breeding season (or when you pull bulls), identify your open cows and sell them early,” he says. “Sometimes you might decide to get them into a feedlot and put some gain on them before you sell them. We’ve been doing that for several years. It depends on the time of year. If you are moving cows out in October-November, that’s usually when the market is lowest. Typically a good marketing time for cull cows is April through August. If it’s just a regional drought, you can market between May and August and still get pretty good value for them. The next year if you have more grass you can repopulate—either buy more cows or keep more heifers,” he says. “Most commercial producers don’t have production records (what each individual cow is doing) to aid them in culling decisions. Some things are obvious, such as a cow that is temperamental or has a bad udder or bad feet. This is
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a good opportunity to get rid of those, and if you have production records you can cull even harder, getting rid of poor producers,” says Olson. “If you have to make culling decisions and don’t have production records to guide you, many people cull an older cow and keep the younger ones with more life ahead of them,” he says. “Another thing a person can do, to find the ones that might be slow breeders or poor producers is to run all the cows through the chute (perhaps at the same time you are doing spring vaccinations) and put heat-detection patches on them. Let’s say you are calving in May-June and realize you are entering a massive drought and need to sell some cows early. The bulls won’t be turned out with the cows until late July, but if it’s getting close to the end of June put a heat patch on the cows. Then you can tell which ones have started to cycle. You can keep those—and eliminate the ones that haven’t cycled yet.” This enables you to keep the fertile, healthy ones that will breed early, and these also tend to be the most productive cows. “A heat patch is only about $1 (at your local supply store or ordered from your AI tech) and can be a cheap way to identify the best cows. If 30% of them are not cycling yet, pick the culls you need to get rid of from that 30%. You can pick the older cows, the ones with bad disposition, poor udders, etc. from that group,” he explains. If a cow is cycling 30 days before the bull is turned in, she will likely breed early. “The other thing you’ll notice when you use those patches is that the cows that aren’t cycling yet are the late calvers. At our place, cows with calves born the end of June are more likely to not be showing signs of estrus yet. Those cows with small young calves might be some you’d sell as pairs to someone who has more grass,” he says.
