University Of Missouri Extension Releases A Winter Management Checklist

The coming new year brings with it a new cycle of management items that need to be considered.  Below are a few things for beef cattle producers to be thinking about in the upcoming weeks.

Feeding programs are an obvious consideration for the winter months.  Hay quality drives supplementation programs, and quality cannot be evaluated visually.  If the hay supply has not yet been tested, that is step one. Then take steps to develop feeding programs that fill nutritional holes in the most cost-effective manner.

Cow body condition, especially prior to calving, is the second puzzle piece to evaluate.  If possible, separate thinner cows from their better conditioned counterparts and feed each group accordingly, based on hay quality determined by the above mentioned hay test.  Be sure feeding spaces are adequate for the number of cattle in the management group.

Review production records from the 2024 calf crop.  Determine if weaning weights increased, decreased, or stayed steady and try to figure out why these changes occurred.  In addition to weaning weights, look at age at weaning.  Calves gain about 2.0 pounds per day.  If weaning weights are down, look at calf age and try to figure out if calves are simply younger at weaning, and if so, why did that happen.

If the calving season is strung out, try to figure out why.  Was there a nutritional or reproductive management issue?  Did a bull go bad during the breeding season?  Was there some weather-related event that reduced breeding activity?  If notes are made in record books about unusual occurrences throughout the year, they can serve as reminders of possible causes for changes or reductions in productivity in a particular year.

Production records don’t have to be complicated in order to be useful.  Calving records are the first step and there are a couple options: (1) record the total number of cows that calve each day of the calving season, or (2) individually identify each calf and record its’ date of birth and mother.

Calving date is a key component of herd weaning weight data, so look at calving records by 21-day calving intervals to determine what percentage of calves were born in the first 21-day period, the second 21-day period, etc.  The goal is to have most of the calves born in either the first or second 21-day calving period.  This indicates good nutritional and reproductive management of the cow herd.

The usefulness of production records cannot be overemphasized.  However, simply collecting data is a worthless exercise.  Records do need to be studied and the information they contain needs to be used in order for the effort to be worthwhile.

If you are looking for a method of keeping production records, many county extension offices have the “Red Books” available for purchase.  These books contain places to record most of the annual activities that occur on a beef operation.  Contact me at the extension center in Sedalia at 660-827-0591 or by e-mail at schmitze@missouri.edu if you have additional questions.

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