What should you look for in a replacement heifer?
According to Dr. Robert Wells, that heifer should come from another herd.
“It’s a best management practice to purchase a replacement from somebody else,” Wells, a livestock consultant with the Samuel R. Noble Foundation in Ardmore, Okla., told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “Our industry is really no different than many other industries; somebody who specializes in a particular segment is more than likely going to have cost efficiencies, and probably be able to do a better job than somebody who is trying to do it on their own. The old saying, ‘A jack of all trades, master of none,’ is very true in our industry.”
There are also genetic advantages to reaching outside for replacements. Wells said if you’re going to develop good quality replacement females, you’re probably going to be giving up traits such as performance, so you’re not getting females that are too big.
“If I’m holding back my own females to develop as replacements for my own herd, all too often a common mistake is going to be to hold back the biggest, heaviest weight heifer in the herd regardless of what her age is,” he said. “I tell cooperators to avoid that pitfall of just looking for the biggest female out there, and look at their birth ages; that’s a good indication of which ones we should keep.”
While the industry does a very good job of matching the genetics of bulls to the producer’s needs, Wells said failure of the commercial cattleman to track the genetics of heifers is a weak point.
“We want to keep females out of cows that have had a calf every year,” he said. “If she has missed a calf, first off she doesn’t need to be in the herd and secondly, if she is, we definitely don’t need to be keeping a female out of her.”
He also said selecting for calves born earlier in your breeding season puts selection pressure on fertility and should increase the overall fertility of the herd over time.
“One thing we tell people is, the closer to home you can buy your heifers, the more they come from an environment similar to yours, the better off it is,” Eldon Cole, University of Missouri Extension regional livestock specialist said. “But inevitably, we have folks who think if they get their cattle from another state, or two or three states away, they’re going to be better. This environment is something that we highly are concerned about, and in Missouri and other states in this region we have fescue. We think if heifers that are going to thrive in a breeding pasture, it’s probably going to be fescue, especially the old kind – the Kentucky 31 with the endophyte – and they probably need to be buying heifers a little closer to home.”
Cole said if you have the luxury of putting heifers into a herd and selecting after the breeding season, “we always like to get those heifers preg checked early and find out who bred that first pill out of the box, so to speak, whether you’re doing AI or natural service. We don’t want them extreme in any way, as far as either frame or sheer weight. We like heifers that are well grown out, probably weighing somewhere in that neighborhood of 700 to 800 pounds at the time you’re going to breed them.”
He also said there should be some uniformity to a set of heifers – either color, muscle type or frame size – and prefers heifers that look like they will shed at an early time in the season; that way, they won’t be carrying a lot of hair and will probably be set back less by being on endophyte infected fescue.
The industry is still struggling to rebuild the cow herd, but the Jan. 1 USDA inventory report showed the beef cow herd up 3.5 percent from a year ago. Wells said now is the time to improve the overall genetics of the herd.
“Rather than just choosing any female that has a functioning uterus, let’s go an find good quality females that are actually going to make good cows, and are going to give good genetics to that subsequent calf every year,” he said.
