That's Rupert my terrier thing.....use him to train sheep to stand up to foxes. He hates my sheep as they chase him and will knock him about if he's not paying attention.Is that a dead fox, or have they just killed somebody's favourite dog?
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Suckler cow future?
- Thread starter WOODCHIP
- Start date
Oh, I see.2 hours a season. Do you think we're cray-cray?
We'd be lucky if we spent a half hour per day working on the farm now - but those couple of hours per cow generally payback about $3k extra profit per cow if we sell the calves right; and it means the cows can be fed to capacity without obesity, mastitis, running milk etc
our heifers also calve at 19-20 months to help keep mature cow size down, so if the cows are weaning double their own liveweight per year without feed costs or special genetics then it is 2 hours well spent.
The bonus for us is that we have really good neighbours who keep in contact over calving, so we get the right calves at the right time and that makes it a really straightforward process
Next question...if you can earn an EXTRA $3k per cow...however much is that in total?
You must be making millions.
I thought I was coining it,. but am obviously a novice
skinning is the trick isn't it.Ask the family if they would like to go out to shed to hold the blue alkathene pipe and feed the calves
Jokin aside , did plenty of that in my youth if a cow lost a calf.
Never again, we skin them now and they take them straight away
Do them out in the field sometimes...pick up the still borne, and walk away
muleman
Member
Yes, never fails with cattle, not as easy with sheep tho!
- Location
- Cheshire
Never tried skinning calves. Always put them in the set on crush and do it that way. Will have too give it a try next time we need too!
- Location
- North of Perth
Get them skinned saves so much time.
Skinned a calf once but didn't have a calf for the cow.5 days after had a set of twins.put the skin on it fed the calf an away they went.did help she was still looking for a calf.
5 days? Dang! Result
Same here don’t think I have ever had a failure skinning calves but cannot seem to be successful with sheep. So much so I never bother anymore.
never? I'll often give it a try in the field, if the donor lamb is within easy reach. It's gonna save all kinds of trouble if it goes sweet. First call as a rule.
(Tip...if she's looking like a flight risk...truss the ewe up so she can't huff off)
Been lambing high lambing % ewes inside for nearly 40 years and skinned a lot and tried many times, if I could get it to work it would be great but sometimes you just have to accept defeat as I am clearly crap at it. Yet I can skin a calf in 10 mins and would never consider not doing it if I have a spare calf to hand, can’t recollect any failures ( but my memory is crap as well)
- Location
- Fife
It’s been written on here before about kiwis chaining calves together to double suckle, 100s at a time.
And Harry Weir (of technograze fame) rears all his Frisian bull calves multi suckled on nurse cows. Each mob of 10 cows and 30 calves is penned twice a day in a small electric paddock and observed to ensure all calves have sucked. He seems to be achieving a hellish ROI.
- Location
- Cheshire
Done plenty of lambs, works 3/4 of the time. Although this last few years I’ve not been very bothered if they take or not given the cull values in spring!
- Location
- North of Perth
I know, probably a bit of luck in there too.cow was happy an so was I.
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
enough
No, really, how much?
cos just the 'extra $3k' per cow sounds pretty good.
You ought to come to the UK, buy a coupla thousand acres and show us how to do it.
Gods teeth, if I was clever enough, I'd have long since sold up and gone off to lounge on a tropical beach.
(palms trees swishing in the warm breeze, attended hand and foot by an elegant pair of dusky handmaids....gosh it would be terrible wrench after all these years of chasing yows round a soggy hillside)
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
You do think I'm cray-cray
I wouldn't farm in the UK if life depended on it
However, the way I figure it, a cow rearing a single calf loses us approx $120/year, in our system.
That's on paper as well as "in the bank" because of the opportunity cost - our dairy grazing generates $730/hd/year and @4/ha that's $2920/ha with all other costs paid by owner
the cow/calf pair then roughly consume "$1600 worth of grazing" and in 2 years' time I get $1600 if I'm lucky, factor in an 8% replacement rate and we're losing money before we really get going.
However if the same cow can rear 3/year then we can sell the calves store to reduce forage demand and that's our sweetspot as far as profitability goes; we can then run the cows on less hectares and have more freedom in terms of selling the calves (as opposed to finishing to spec and being reamed by falling schedules etc)
One freedom to be enjoyed is that we can get calves that people don't want to rear (because that's a ticket to Shitsville, as we know) but will be in demand as stores - speckle-park heifers are so sought-after that an incalf heifer isn't worth a great deal less than a finished steer to us, but with a lot less feed down the throat
this is all assuming no more time is spent on the cow/calf thing than the dairy grazing thing, and it's also how I managed to rid myself of sheep
I wouldn't farm in the UK if life depended on it
However, the way I figure it, a cow rearing a single calf loses us approx $120/year, in our system.
That's on paper as well as "in the bank" because of the opportunity cost - our dairy grazing generates $730/hd/year and @4/ha that's $2920/ha with all other costs paid by owner
the cow/calf pair then roughly consume "$1600 worth of grazing" and in 2 years' time I get $1600 if I'm lucky, factor in an 8% replacement rate and we're losing money before we really get going.
However if the same cow can rear 3/year then we can sell the calves store to reduce forage demand and that's our sweetspot as far as profitability goes; we can then run the cows on less hectares and have more freedom in terms of selling the calves (as opposed to finishing to spec and being reamed by falling schedules etc)
One freedom to be enjoyed is that we can get calves that people don't want to rear (because that's a ticket to Shitsville, as we know) but will be in demand as stores - speckle-park heifers are so sought-after that an incalf heifer isn't worth a great deal less than a finished steer to us, but with a lot less feed down the throat
this is all assuming no more time is spent on the cow/calf thing than the dairy grazing thing, and it's also how I managed to rid myself of sheep
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Why not ?
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Too much of an old-boys club
Too much emphasis on producing livestock too big to really fit the landscape, which then requires sheds and machines and lots of work and extra cost, all to produce steaks that fit trays that fit supermarket shelves
be a damn sight better for the environment to just make the shelves 10% smaller and negate paragraph 2
I like a paid-by-weight system because I like high stocking rates because I like high profitability and improving our land the fastest, as we've discussed there are barriers everywhere to replicating a really low-cost pasture-only system in the UK
and, some really nosey fickers live there
Fair enough
Often the steak is to big for the tray so they have to trim a bit off and give it to the slughter house dog
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
I'm as slippery as one of them