Expansion

[Conrad]

I have 330 spring calving cows. Drying whole herd of before xmas and starting on 1st feb again.
Always sell my empties in oct. have a low replacement rate.
Was going to keep my empties next year and milk them right through. Hoped to get them back in calf the following yr. would this work will they still go in calf. ?
Will still milk march April calfers as well to keep milk sales up.
Only going to do it for 1 year to speed up herd expansion to 400 cows.
Empty rate usually 9 - 12 %.

 

[Irish NZ]

You'll end up with some fat butterballs that won't get in calf as easy as you think. And go empty the next season anyway.

 

[WillM]

I have no experience in spring calving. You can have my 2cents from a Holstein point of view.

I was always told that if you have a profitable, sustainable business model. What ever the cull rate (or empty rate in your case). If you have a desire to expand you expand with maintaining the same business model.

In the short & long term it would be more beneficial to rear more heifers or buy extra stock to aid expansion. The model stays the same.

 

[multi power]

40-50% of them might get pregnant next time round but really if they are much good they would already be pregnant

 

[Clay52]

You'll end up with some fat butterballs that won't get in calf as easy as you think. And go empty the next season anyway.

And if you are breeding for extra replacements you are going to get replacements that have poor genetics for fertility.

 

[buffalo_soldier]

Carry rounds while an option isn't the best one.

They still eat as much whilst producing much less.
Also they are empty for a reason.

 

[Headless chicken]

We do it/ done it only on cows that hold their production up enough and then they get one straw on the next time. Don’t hold to that and it’s bye bye

 

[Beef farmer]

With an empty rate of 12% a replaceent rate of???20%? Unless tb is rife, expansion through breeding replacments should be easy enough.

 

[multi power]

If I ever carry any over I just breed them to beef
I have plenty of better things to do than breeding more culls

 

[Sparkymark]

Cull them now and use the revenue to buy replacements. Cull cow price is good so why carry passengers.

 

[Grassman247]

Farm I worked on in NZ did it, they dried them off by stopping milking them and then put them into an area with basically no feed for the winter, they got fed the scraps from the silage stack. Basically they stripped the weight off them and then put them on a rising plain to flush them, worked pretty well from memory, was 9 years ago now.

Wasn’t exactly my cup of tea from a welfare point but maybe if you had some spare shed space and they could all eat at the same time you could put them on a restricted diet?

 

[Cows 'n grass]

If the aim is just to build cow numbers in the short term then running a few cows around is fine, there's no need to breed from them.

As I've been building numbers I've always carried some cows over and this will be the first year I haven't. Your more dairy cows have an amazing ability to pick up yield again on spring grass, I had several this year that probably would have dropped to 6 or 7 litres on OAD over winter then picked back up to 20 odd by May. Some will just give up completely over winter though.

 

[thewalrus]

I did a similar thing with our autumn calving heard. Carried over anything not in calf.

70% held to first service... the extra rest maybe? the rest took longer or where culled. I'd say ai once then cull.
But carried over cows don't last, not long before they are calving at the backend again!

 

[mixed farm]

I did a similar thing with our autumn calving heard. Carried over anything not in calf.

70% held to first service... the extra rest maybe? the rest took longer or where culled. I'd say ai once then cull.
But carried over cows don't last, not long before they are calving at the backend again!

Yeah but if you get another 3 seasons out of them before they slip they're worth keeping. We do split blocks and some cows might just struggle once and go in calf no problem for years after that. Of course some don't . Worth keeping if she got some form of setback, hard calving etc but if she has low fertility then she's better off gone. That's my take on it anyway!