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cost to keep a cow
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Galaxie64
Posted 3/4/2010 20:22 (#1105205 - in reply to #1104592)
Subject: RE: cost to keep a cow


WY, OK
eddie - 3/4/2010 08:07

$600 to carry a cow is pedaling backwards real fast.  Agree with you on the university folks, they don't function in the real world and a lot of things look good on paper that don't look so great in reality.  I think there are two different worlds going on here.  Guys running 10 cows and guys running 500 cows, the guy with 10 cows is playing and never will cover his costs because he doesn't have economy of scale, the guy with 500 cows is scraping a living out of it and is making real world decisions.  Start figuring in cow depreciation and all the other extraneous costs (trailers, tractors, trucks, watering equipment, corrals, chutes, scales, etc.) associated with running cows, and a majority of guys work for free.


That is exactly it, cattle are our business there is no other income other than the infrequent natural resource lease or utility easement. Almost every cow, 2 year old or not that loses a calf and isn't fortunate enough to have a twin available to adopt gets shipped. Just because we sell one doesn't mean we are going to buy another one to replace it, if that was the case you'd never sell them. Currently we are restocking 30-50% of the herd with home grown replacements every year, eventually that will go down to 10-15% when we get back up to operating/profitability size. Aside from all the input costs already discussed that will not be offset by that 2 year old's calf she is also going to be physically bigger than all of her sisters for the rest of her life because she didn't raise a calf that first year. So not only is she in the hole $500-$700 for a calf she didn't raise she is now going to eat 10%-20% more than all the others that carried a calf, and she will do this the rest of her life. So she needs to make up $600 for the lost calf and another 15% for her intake so say $690, not to mention the $900+ in her just to get her to be a bred 2 year old heifer. So now you have a cow that is $1590 in the hole with her second calf on the way. Figure an average herd life expectancy of 7-9 years and it is going to be close if she ever gets in the black.

We got around $800 for some 2 year old's that lost their calves a week ago, that puts them at a break even or a slight loss when taking all cost including opportunity costs into account and it shows a little cash flow in a dead time of the year. Now every now and then we have kept a few heifers that ever were open or lost a calf, every time because their mothers were exceptional cows and that bloodline was preferred. On most we were lucky enough that they stayed in the herd well past the average and produced replacement heifers on top of that.

As for the eggheads the dumbest thing I have heard recently was an argument that you can't afford to have a calving rate higher than 90%, it was one of the most asinine things I have heard but they had all their little charts and graphs to prove it. Of course they also at the same time couldn't get a pregnancy rate over the low 90%'s which tells me they were doing something incredibly wrong 98%+ is easily attainable.
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