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| You asked a question about lush pasture and calving heifers out in a earlier thread.
(I personally did something similar to this a year ago, didn’t get the heifers pulled off until about a week prior to calving, we pulled several more than we have since we started AI a couple years ago. I’m not going to base my whole life off one experience, so that’s why I want to reach out to somebody else on here to see what their experiences have been.
This year I put the skinny second calf heifers and younger cows on the cover crop thinking that they may more appropriately be where the condition needs to be added, I think ideally I would save it for the steers and heifers, but I’m gun shy of the hotwire situation.)
I've never had the luxury of calving anything out or even close to 4-5 months before calving date in a pasture situation like that. All pastures would be frozen and dead by the 4-5 month time frame. In fact all our fall grazing of cultivated crop ground is done today. Those cows are trailing home tomorrow. I wanted to come today. However my sons have set a Christmas tradition of trailing those cows home on Christmas afternoon or the day after. It's only 2 miles so no big deal.
I've calved a lot of cows on native and crested wheat grass and cheat grass on green up. Never had a problem with calves growing too big because they had pently of travel room.
I've calved plenty of Holsteins heifers full feed of good choice alfalfa, 1st or 2nd crop. Locked up in smaller dry lots, never had any real abnormal presentations of calfs.
On beef cows pulled a few, but we've always just watched birth weights on first calf heifers. Then after that pour the coals to them in bull power, 100 lb. birth weights don't scare me on cows that get lots of exercise.
I guess my feelings are calving problems are more tied to birth weights and cow genetics and also lack of exercise and also human interactions right at the time a cow wants to lay down and birth. Lots of calving problems come from just humans messing with them at the wrong time.
It's a fine line we walk to have enough weight on a new born calf to survive a storm and cold temps. Yet be able to get their feet under them and get circulation going. 45 lb. calves are high risk in my opinion in cold temps. Yet swing it to the other side of pendulum and get over 85 lbs. and you run risk of same cold temps. and severe storm and that calf lays there out of cow and soent get up either.
That's the main reason we don't A.I. cattle, not that I don't belive in it. But for the simple fact my biggest problem is weather conditions at calving time be it heifers or cows. No way I can shift calving to later. Because I run on federal lands and I'm constrained to calender dates. So we try to spread calving cycle just a bit in first of March. Those first two week in March make or break us.
So some say well just shed calve them, nope that won't work here as well. Yes we could build sheds pay labor, but at end of day locking those desert cattle up to shed calve will create more bonding problems than you are trying to save by locking them up.
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Bigdaddy Carlson62, answer to you question
