All About Beef Cattle
There are many aspects of raising beef cattle; from breeding to feeding to calving; each rancher and farmer having their own important, individual contributions to the American beef industry.
There is no ‘right way’ of raising cattle, so in this post we’ll be sharing with you how we do things at Five Marys Ranch!
We’ve included a few downloadable freebies in this post, but you can learn even more by joining M5 Ranch School and exploring our 40+ workshops! Lets get into it!
Cattle Terms
Heifer: a young female cow that has not had any offspring
Cow: after giving birth to her first calf, a heifer becomes a cow. A cow is a mature female bovine that has had at least one calf.
Bull: an uncastrated male bovine that is used for breeding purposes.
Steer: a castrated male bovine that is primarily raised for beef.
Calf: the male or female offspring of a cow
Yearling: a calf that is one year old
Breeds of Cattle
Angus
Now that we’ve defined some cattle terms, let’s talk about what breed of cattle we have here on the ranch. The five most common types of cattle in the United States are Black Angus, Charolais, Hereford, Simmental, and Red Angus.
Here are Five Marys, we have Black Angus cattle. We chose them because they are a well refined breed, known for their high-quality beef. They do very well in our climate here in Northern California.
Breeding
Our cattle are wish us from birth to harvest. An Angus cow’s gestation period is 281 days. Cows become pregnant either by bull or by artificial insemination. We use both methods on the ranch for the best results. Genetic predisposition of the bull is extremely important to take into account while breeding. Many important individual beef cattle traits are inherited from its parents, so quality bull selection is very important. Artificial insemination is often used to enhance the overall genetics of the herd, as some of the best bulls in the United States can be made available to individual ranches.
Good quality bulls can cost between $2,000-$25,000 and a bull in an AI (artificial insemination) program can be upwards of $500,000 a bull! You pay per ‘straw’ of semen, so you can get really great quality genetics for a fraction of the price of owning a bull. But, AI doesn’t always ‘take,’ so we also have great quality bulls to put in with females immediately after artificial insemination.
Here, breeding starts on the 1st of December, and the bulls are out for about 75-90 days. With that timeline, calves are born throughout September, October, and sometimes into November.
Calving Season
If you follow along with us on Instagram (@fivemarys), you may have seen us ‘checking cows’ quite a bit. Throughout the year, our cattle get checked twice a day. This means riding through the pastures (usually on a 4-wheeler or horseback) and making sure everything is in good order. During calving season, we check our cattle 4 to 5 times a day.
This is a critical time to be looking at things more closely. We’re checking that new calves are quickly standing up and nursing. We’re also keeping a close eye on pregnant cows to make sure that if they are giving birth, it is going smoothly. More often than not, cows birth smoothly by themselves, but once in a while manual intervention is necessary.
For example, in the case of a breech calf, we would intervene and manually pull the calf out to save the calf and perhaps the cow as well. Pulling a calf usually involves getting the mom into our corrals, where we have a squeeze chute to gently but safely hold the cow so that we can assist her. We have to grab the feet or the head and actually pull the calf out of the calf to help her deliver it.
Once the calves are born, we’ll continue to check the mother’s udders for milk production. We’ll also keep a close eye on the calve’s health. Calves can be very susceptible to disease, especially pneumonia, during the time of year when the weather brings major temperature swings.
Our way to tell that a cow is about to give birth is by looking for cows away from the rest of the group. When herd animals don’t feel right, they will seek privacy and distance themselves away from others. They like some privacy for birth, like many other species. They also become very ‘watchy,’ meaning they will crane their neck when they see you coming. If you see a cow away from the herd, their head being held high looking at you, and not chewing their cud, those are some indicators she may be about to give birth.
Here on the ranch, we put the mother cows on a mineral program with important vitamins and minerals that she might be missing from the soil. These help them in many ways, to stay healthy, but also help the strength of their contractions during labor, hopefully allowing for a smoother birthing process.
When the calf is born, the mother cow will generally be laying down. She will then get up and start licking the sack off of the calf to encourage it to stand up and start nursing. Calves will stand up and start nursing within minutes of being born. It’s very important they drink colostrum within the first few hours after birth. Colostrum is the first form of milk produced by the mammary glands of mammals immediately following delivery of a newborn. It contains many antibodies to protect the newborn against disease. You may hear colostrum referred to as ‘liquid gold.’
Even though calves all look pretty much the same to humans, a cow will not be confused by their calf. After licking them clean and encouraging their calf to nurse, they will not allow other calves that aren’t theirs to nurse from them. If a calf tries to nurse from a mother cow that isn’t their own, the cow may kick them away or refuse it.
Frequently, if a cow has twins, they will only accept and allow one of them to nurse. This is another reason checking cows often is so important during calving season. If we see a calf that is not being fed and becoming malnourished, we will need to bottle feed that calf until it is big enough to go back out to pasture with the herd.
When the cow goes off to find water or food, she may find some tall grass and put her calf there while she is gone. When she comes back, she will remember right where she left her calf.
While coming across a newborn calf, we will give them a shot of vitamins and minerals. This shot of minerals is especially important here in Northern Califrnia because we have zero selenium, and selenium is a very important trace mineral for reproduction and development. In addition to giving a shot of minerals, we ‘tag the calves.’
This meals we will give them an ear tag with a number that matches their mother cow. The tag is used to know which cow that specific calf came from. It’s important for us to keep those records to track growth and development. Knowing the family line also helps while making sorting selections down the road.
Sorting Cattle
Replacement Heifers
There are three types of sorting we do late each summer on the ranch. The first type we will explain is a sorting process for replacement heifers. Cows in a herd eventually reach an age when they can’t reproduce anymore, usually around 10-14 years old. We replace those cows with the top end of our heifer calves from the year before. Older cows either stay on the ranch to live out their days, or they go to a cattle auction where they are sold for lesser quality meat. Typically, ranchers will keep 10% to 15% of their best heifers as replacement breeding animals to grow their herd. We like to keep closer to 20% as we grow our herd.
When we sort for replacement heifers, we are visually looking for many different things. We look for a particular confirmation, or body type. We look for straight backs, leg structure, and deep bodies that would accommodate a baby. We know when each of these heifers were born, so we like to look at the bigger end of the calves.
Another aspect of choosing replacement heifers is identifying them back to their mothers. We can check to see if their moms had any health problems or poor milk production. We know if the mother gave birth to twins. This is an important thing to keep in mind, as the female twin out of a fraternal set, is infertile about 90% of the time. We would not choose a female twin as a replacement heifer because of those odds for reproduction problems.
Meat Program
The second type of sort we do at the ranch is when we select animals into our meat program. We typically take the biggest end of steers. After the sorting process takes place, steers that were chosen for the meat program will begin the ‘finishing process’ at 1 year old. This meals they will be put on a high-quality barley, alfalfa, and natural grasses ration. This ration will help to bring out the highest quality and flavor of the meat.
4H Steers
The third type of sort we will do is picking the girl’s 4H steers! We will choose these mainly on body confirmation, similar to the previous two sorts. We also choose partly on their mood. For example, if Tessa is going to be working with this steer, we would choose a clam steer that isn’t too aggressive!
Feeding and Grazing
Along the lines of feeding, there is a saying that has a lot of significance around here, which is ‘grass doesn’t grow year round!’ Every area of the ranch will have a growing season, and cattle are only able to graze when the grass is growing, which is about 8 months of the year in Northern California.
Once the grass stops growing and they are no longer able to graze for food, we begin feeding them locally raised alfalfa twice a day for the rest of the year.
M5 Ranch School FREEBIES!
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