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CNY | One thing that doesn’t get brought up with all of this cow/calf talk is the amount of beef on dairy crosses today. Pretty much every dairy around here has genomic tested their cows and are breeding the top 10-25% of their herd to sexed female semen. Everything else gets bred to beef. I realize the US beef herd is like 5x the size of the dairy herd (which is somewhere around 9 million) but 4-5 million dairy cross calves is significant.
Also, I know a couple small cow/calf guys. Not one of them are expanding. The common answer is- “calves can go back to $300”. Anyone who has been around a while knows how cyclical it can be. I have a very small cow herd, finish all my calves and sell them all for freezer beef. I am adding a few head, but we have been slowly growing. I can make more on my tillable acres selling forage to dairies than having more cows. I am fencing some more fields that touch my home farm. So the rotation will be corn chopped for silage, then wheat, then combine the wheat and bale the straw. Then plant something the cows can graze for a couple months. But I had planned on doing it anyway, not affected by current prices. | |
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Cow/calf talk
