The silent killer of cow-calf profitability is the bad habits of producers, according to Dr. Jordan Thomas, and holding on to less efficient cows is one of the worst.
“What causes long hay-feeding seasons and long calving seasons is the person in the mirror — we need to work on how we think,” says the cow-calf specialist from the University of Missouri. Thomas was a keynote speaker on Beef Day at the Grey-Bruce Farmers Week in January 2023.
It’s a mindset
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Thomas related an experiment conducted by Dr. Daniel Kahneman in which a classroom of students was divided into thirds. One-third were told they owned a “mug” that was bought for $9.99 on campus and were asked what a fair price would be to sell it. One-third were told they could buy the mug and were also asked to price it. One-third were told they could take a mug or the money but were also asked what a good price would be.
The sellers priced the mug at three times more than the buyers or choosers were willing to pay.
“The only difference was that the sellers were holding the mug in their hands and felt as though they owned it,” he says, adding that “ownership bias” causes people to overvalue items they own.
He then related it to producers hanging on to later-bred cows or later-bred heifers or cows that don’t conceive early in the season.
“We choose not to market them because we overvalue them.”
Thomas explains that if a cow conceives towards the end of the breeding season, she’ll be ready much later postpartum for the next breeding season or may not be able to conceive at all. He pointed out that earlier-bred cows tend to be more likely to produce a viable embryo than later-bred cows.
“If we give cows just one opportunity to conceive, we ought to expect to have about 25 per cent of them open. That’s just the biology of the animal,” he says of cows that are bred later.
The cows that are not producing efficiently contribute to “annual cow depreciation costs,” which Thomas argues is the second-highest cost of production after feed.
By the numbers
He showed some data that demonstrated cows with earlier calving dates are far more likely to calve in subsequent years. Only about seven per cent of early calvers fail to calve the next year. That number rises to 40 per cent for cows that calve from 121 to 140 days into the season.
“The later the cow calves, the more likely it is she’ll be open next year.”
He says the study that produced this data was published in 1958, noting that while the knowledge has been around for a long time, its application hasn’t caught on everywhere.
Thomas presented data that showed heifers that calved in the first 21 days of the season stayed in the herd longer than heifers that had later calving dates.
He then went through the value of heifers and cows over their lifetime, pointing out that good heifers that are bred back and consistently produce healthy calves appreciate in the first couple of years. They are at their peak for years three through five and begin to quickly depreciate in year six. Finally, they level out at a lower value through years nine and 10, whether they’re bred or not.
To market or not
To demonstrate the value of selling at the right time, he gave the example of a two-year-old open cow.
“What do you do with it — it’s too old to go into the premium quality beef chain, and often she’ll be taken out as a cull cow. That’s a tremendous reduction in value and a tremendous cost,” he says, adding there’s a huge difference in value between a bred four-year-old cow and an open five-year-old.
On the revenue side, a cow that calves earlier will have heavier calves and more of them over her lifetime.
“The average beef calf gains two pounds a day from birth to weaning, so a 60-day difference in calf age can easily be 120 pounds,” he says. “That’s a substantially different weaning weight.”
A study showed that cows that calved in the first 21 days of their first calving season consistently weaned heavier calves in the subsequent five years. These cows are set up earlier and are ready to calve earlier, giving the calves more time to gain weight.
Thomas advises producers to “get radical” about picking replacement heifers.
“We have a bad habit of going into the pen and finding the biggest and prettiest heifers and what we fail to remember is what we really need is heifers that conceive early,” he says, warning until the heifer is confirmed pregnant early in the season, she’s only a replacement candidate.
Cow-calf producers who pick replacement heifers are both buyers and sellers, having developed the heifers (seller) and needing heifers for the herd (buyer). Thomas’s warning to producers was not to “sell” themselves later-conceiving, less-profitable heifers.
One of Thomas’s rules of thumb for cow-calf profitability is to remember producers buy every cow every year, whether they actually buy them or keep them on. In essence, the decision to buy something and the decision not to sell something are functionally the same.
He says that producers tend to think of their cows on the ranch as theirs until they’re open or fully depreciated.
“What we really ought to be doing is thinking about how we can strategically sell off cows that are bad investments and redeploy that equity to investments that have a greater potential return,” he says. A good way to go about this is to sell cows a year ahead of time, when they’re pregnant and younger versus when they’re open and older.
Synchronization key
Getting the right reproductive management system with heifers and cows conceiving and calving early and around the same time not only increases the value of the calves but also saves on labour, feed and other costs. It also reduces the risk of disease, avoiding having older and younger calves commingling. That’s why Thomas strongly advocates for marketing later-conceiving cows and replacing them with earlier-conceiving cows.
“Be more aggressive about cow replacement and more thoughtful about maintaining an early calving season.”
Thomas says that synchronization is like playing a multi-year game, with the timing of conception influencing fertility for the next breeding season.
He advises producers to choose a protocol that they can balance out their cash flow, but consider it a long-term investment.
He cited a 2015 study from Florida in which, for the first couple of years, the number of mean calving days was around 80. Once the calving days were tightened to 59 days the next year, the value of the calves rose by $87 each and the herd value went up by more than $19,000. By the end of the study five years later, when calving days were reduced to 38, the per-calf value was up $169 and the herd value increased by $50,700.
