Well, you'd end up with $300 or less in your cows, and they gonna wean a black, polled 500 lb calf in 6 mos. Your inputs will be salt and minerals. The last crop we sold was in 2021, in August, and we averaged $750 per steer, a little loess for the heifers. If we were selling today we'd get over $1k per calf. Just buy the best registered Brangus bull you can afford, and I don't think you could lose money with this operation even if you tried to. Anyone I have known that is trying to do what we do, that didn't have the same success we are having, is because they didn't use homozygous black, polled bulls, and/or they fed them, fertilized pastures, wormed, vaccinated, etc. In other words, had the same inputs they would have with beef cows. Another factor that I often forget to take into account, is the Kudzu. I don't know what the results would be, if this rough, cut-over timber pasture did NOT have Kudzu. Feed, hay, protein tubs, etc., would raise the inputs.
In the past, we had our herd calving in September and sold all the calves end of August. With this herd of Mexican Corrs I have been building, and then being anywhere from open to caving when they got off the trailer, we are now just going to leave the bulls in year round. The calves will bring more selling them a few at a time down here anyway.
Toro, our Corr bull, has gone to the man who bought my Plummers, that raises bucking bulls for junior and high school rodeo. We have that 1/2 MFB bull calf and the two heifer calves (that Zeke will raise for us) , and we will have 14 more from those cows I am buying today. These we will keep separate, and use them to eventually change the herd from Corrr cows to 1/2 Corr- 1/2 MFB cows. Where we will keep them is an old 15 acre hayfield that was bermuda, Johnson , and crab grass. No Kudzu, so it will be interesting to see how they do.
