With summertime officially here, so is the heat. While we are try to cope with the summer heat, it’s a tough time on our cattle. Here several articles that talk more about the effect of heat on cattle and how you can help.

A recent article, Guarding Against Cattle Heat Stress, mentions several ways to help your cattle minimize heat stress, including:

- Cattle that must be handled during hot weather should spend less than 30 minutes in the working facility.
- Make every effort to see that cool, fresh water is available to cattle in close confined areas for any length of time.

Another article, Heat Stress can Reduce Pregnancy Rates, describes research that shows how the heat stress has a direct effect on cow’s reproduction.

“They found that heat stress of beef cows from day 8 through 16 affected the weights of the conceptus (embryo, fluids, and membranes) and the increased body temperature may have formed an unfavorable environment for embryo survival.  The percentage of pregnancies maintained throughout the week of severe heat stress was considerably reduced. “

What have you found helps your cattle handle the summer time heat?

Culling cows can be decided throughout the year, and is a common discussion in the summer and winter months when grass and resources may be sparse. Many ranches use a cow’s breeding history to decide (or at least influence) if she stays on the ranch, or needs to be culled.

Glenn Selk, Oklahoma State University Extension cattle reproduction specialist says:

“When the heifers that failed to breed in the first breeding season were followed throughout their lifetimes, they averaged a 55% yearly calf crop. Despite the fact that reproduction isn’t a highly heritable trait, it also makes sense to remove this genetic material from the herd so as to not proliferate females that are difficult to get bred. ”

Read the complete article Preg Check and Cull Replacement Heifers Early

Looking for additional articles about culling? Check out last month’s post about the influence that open cows have on your bottom line.

A cattle software program such as CattleMax can help you keep track of palpation results, breeding records and more, which will help you more easily identify poor-producing females.

Though the temperatures are warmer and the grass is greener, now is still a good time to be making culling decisions.

Just how much influence does an open cow have on your operation? Ted G. Dyer, UGA Extension Animal Scientist, explains the impact:

“Open cows are the greatest contributor to a low weaning percentage (# calves weaned/ # cows exposed at breeding). On the average, a cow that does not breed one time will lose 15-20 percent of her lifetime production potential. Furthermore, it will take the net return from two or three productive cows to pay for the maintenance of the open cow.”

Read the complete article “Producers Must Make Obvious Culling Decisions in the Spring”

Speaking of culling, have you checked out Nathan’s article about options for selling cull cows and bulls?

How are your culling plans going? What factors are you using to determine which cows to keep and which to sell? Post a comment – we want to hear!

How many heifer calves should I keep or consider purchasing? It’s a question that comes up often. While the answer certainly varies by producer, there are several factors you can consider.

Glenn Selk with Oklahoma State University says a few include average age of the herd, predicting the number of females that will become pregnant and understanding typical heifer growing patterns can all be helpful in answering this question.

Even in the very best scenarios, some heifers will be difficult or impossible to breed.  Most extension specialists and researchers write about the need to always expose at least 10% more heifers than you need even when they are grown properly and all weigh at least 65% of the expected mature weight.

Read the article “How Many Heifers to Keep”

The CattleMax software includes several graphs and reports that can help you with making these kinds of decisions – see the Reports & Graphs options in action.

How do you determine how many heifers to keep? Click on the Comments link below and share your experience!

Ryan Reuter and Jessica Robinette of The Noble Foundation have written a very interesting article on artificial insemination and calving distribution.

Some producers hesitate to implement such a system because they envision the resulting calf crop being born on a single day and creating a problem if the heifers require calving assistance. Fortunately, biological variability takes care of this potential problem.

Click to read the article at the Noble Foundation

Did you know CattleMax software can help tremendously in keeping up with synchronization (through medical records herd update) and also AI bulls, semen inventory, and AI breeding?

Have a few club calf AI sires in mind for the next breeding season and would like to have a closer look at them? Jeff at Cattle.com can help – he’s posted videos of bulls that were at the Denver show and is posting more daily. He also has other interesting posts mixed in!

Check it out at http://www.cattle.com/

We recently used the BioPRYN blood test method  to preg check the cows we AI bred earlier this year before turning them in with the bull. It could not have gone smoother for us, so I wanted to talk a little about our experience, and see what some of you had to say about it. I highlighted some of the advantages and disadvantages we found with the blood pregnancy testing below.

Advantages of the blood test method:

• Simple, quick, clean sampling. The tail bleeding was very easy to do. We only had trouble with one cow, and the process was much cleaner that palpating.
• You can test earlier. You only have to wait 30 days after breeding.
• Quick results. We received the results of our test the same day the samples were delivered to the lab. Obviously, this isn’t as quick as the immediate response you get with palpation, but you can also sample cattle on your own time, instead of working with your veterinarian’s schedule (if you don’t palpate yourself).
• It seems to be highly accurate. Of course, we won’t find out for ourselves until calving season, but the results we read about seem promising. We were trying to sell a bred cow (assuming she was bred) the same week, and wanted to be accurate with the preg check to avoid an unhappy customer.

Disadvantages of the blood test method:

• Only gives the result of open or bred. The blood tests cannot reveal how far along each cow is. For our purposes, this wasn’t necessarily a big issue. Since all the cows we checked were AI bred, we had an exact breeding date anyway.
• Waiting for samples to travel through the mail. There are only a handful of facilities that can do the testing. Unless you live close to a BioPRYN affiliate that can run the test, you have to mail in your samples. It took ours two days to travel from Arizona to Kansas, even though it was sent “overnight”.

If you  are thinking about using the blood testing method to preg check your own cows, CattleMax does have the proper record fields to enter the results in your Pregnancy Check History or Pregnancy and Breeding History screen.

Have you already tried the blood test method to preg check in your herd? If so, what did you think? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages you found?