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South Dakota | Obviously no one read the articles I posted the other day. Cow size does not necessarily mean that a cow will be more efficient. Cows of comparable size can have vastly different feed conversion and ease of maintenance. Culling cows is the most inefficient way of selecting for the traits you want, the bull is the starting place (obviously culling needs to occur though). If you go too far towards selecting for cows that have high $EN, your milk goes down and your calf weight goes down. I'm focusing on moderation. Extremely low milk leads to really high $EN, but if you go to high on milk, you sacrifice the cow for the calf. Here's American Made and lots of people like him. His WW is 31 above the breed average and his YW is 46 above the breed average. However his milk is +46, which is 22 over the breed average! His $EN is -44. He's a calving ease bull, so maybe people's goal with him is to get big calves out of heifers. His high milk is going to make a tough to maintain cow and really tough to maintain heifer. I want to have a moderate milk EPD so I can raise a good calf, but then if I retain a replacement heifer, she will be an easy keeping cow.
For culling cows, I look at size more for calf uniformity. I don't try to get cows fat in the winter, I want to have around a bcs 6 prior to calving. I want to be able to do that without breaking the bank getting there. Right now, my cows are on corn stalks and get alfalfa every 3 days, that's it, but they're may calvers. If it snows, I'll give grass hay, but that's it. I run a Darwin system, where if they're too high maintenance, they'll select themselves out.
Also, if a person had time and patience, they could easily measure efficiency on grass. Separate your cattle in to experimental groups of very similar cattle or else you could test them one at a time. Divide a uniform pasture into paddocks and measure hohow long it takes for your cattle to go through their allotted grass, then move them and measure again. After it's all done, measure weaning weights, cows weights and BCS scores. That would be the true comparison. Otherwise, I like the idea of making them fit your program. If a single cow or two looks like crap, don't baby them to get them back in condition, treat them all the same and make them forage. If they don't thrive on that system, cull them, it's that simple. That's what I do and it's working great, the calves look better every year as I select for genetics that work.
http://abs-bs.absglobal.com/beef/angus.asp?CodTouro=29AN1860 | |
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Cow Efficiency
