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se montana | Thanks for an informative thread. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
I’m all about calving out on pasture and letting cows find good shelter and staying out of the mud. I use a bike or a horse or a snowmobile to run through the pastures once a day(2 different pastures one half section big). When the weather is nasty, I’ll try harder than that to warm stuff up and dry it off, but calving mid March, I avoid a fair amount of snow.
Calving a couple hundred mature cows, I might have one backward,head back calf every 3 years. It’s not worth living with them to save that. I’ll find a bumb calf about every other year that was probably a twin and I’ll bottle feed it till I find it a mother. My pastures are a ways apart as well.
Now my first calf heifers get locked in a 7 acre trap and calved with cameras on them Around the clock. I check camera once during the night. I went for a few warm weather years and didn’t night check the heifers and got by just fine, but with temps colder than freezing at night, and I went back to night checking them.
I think it all comes down to qualify of life, income return vs time invested, and do you have any thing else to do that has a monetary value. Here it is farming in the spring.
I’ve got neighbors that calve just like I do, and some lock their whole herd into a mud hole and touch every calf in one way or another. I don’t know what saves more calves, but I know what I prefer.
My biggest death losses over the past 20 years have been stillborns, not hypothermia or distocia. I can’t control stillborns | |
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Calving on large herds
