not sure how you ranchers do it.....

[greybeard]

How long between when you mowed the pigweed and the bull's time of death?
I have never seen any redroot pigweed here, but seems I've read that both mowing it and spraying it can make it more palatable and attractive to cattle and horses.

Sometimes, it's all just luck of the draw--good years and bad years. Hope your next one is better.

 

[Stocker Steve]

Get rid of anything that causes the slightest problem.

Bought too cheap at the start, and had to cull our way out.
Culled around 25% per year and tried to buy back better for while.
Retained heifers from the survivors are pretty bullet proof.

 

[angus9259]

How long between when you mowed the pigweed and the bull's time of death?
I have never seen any redroot pigweed here, but seems I've read that both mowing it and spraying it can make it more palatable and attractive to cattle and horses.

Sometimes, it's all just luck of the draw--good years and bad years. Hope your next one is better.

Interesting on the pigweed comments. Didn't think that. Bull hasn't died yet - sorry if I implied that. I caught him as he was starting to go down and was able to purge (mineral oil and epsom salts) him and get some B vitamins and banamine in him per my vet. He's just starting eating grass again. The mastitis cow is on the bubble still. Temp is down 2 degrees from yesterday but she still looks like hill. The cow I pulled twins on I was suspecting twins based on when she was coming into labor so much earlier than all her previous calves so I had a close eye on her. I started in after the calves after only about an hour of watching her pace and not get anywhere. My point is that I am actually physically here to catch all this. So I'm not sure how you all do it who aren't able to watch things so close.....

 

[angus9259]

Get rid of anything that causes the slightest problem.

Bought too cheap at the start, and had to cull our way out.
Culled around 25% per year and tried to buy back better for while.
Retained heifers from the survivors are pretty bullet proof.

None of your cows get sick or ever have any issues? All your calves live every year?

 

[Rafter S]

I didn't know pigweed was poisonous. I have some in the pasture and never had any trouble with it. I even remember an old Jersey milk cow we had years ago that loved the stuff. If I'd cut it with a hoe and throw it over the fence she'd be there to grab it. I never could understand how she could eat it with the thorns, but she would.

 

[cowgirl8]

I didn't know pigweed was poisonous. I have some in the pasture and never had any trouble with it. I even remember an old Jersey milk cow we had years ago that loved the stuff. If I'd cut it with a hoe and throw it over the fence she'd be there to grab it. I never could understand how she could eat it with the thorns, but she would.

We have it too and the cows love it. There are different types. The one with the thorns i think is less toxic if at all...some people who say theirs is toxic usually have no thorns...
I hate the stuff, grows only where we feed hay which makes no sense. Our hay fields have no pig weed in it, so something else is bringing it in...

 

[Margonme]

I didn't know pigweed was poisonous. I have some in the pasture and never had any trouble with it. I even remember an old Jersey milk cow we had years ago that loved the stuff. If I'd cut it with a hoe and throw it over the fence she'd be there to grab it. I never could understand how she could eat it with the thorns, but she would.

There are probably 4 or 5 species of pigweed here on my farm. I see cows eating it during various stages of growth, even spiny pigweed. The variety we call hogweed is very palatable. I Googled it and found no comment that it was poison.

 

[angus9259]

I didn't know pigweed was poisonous. I have some in the pasture and never had any trouble with it. I even remember an old Jersey milk cow we had years ago that loved the stuff. If I'd cut it with a hoe and throw it over the fence she'd be there to grab it. I never could understand how she could eat it with the thorns, but she would.

There are probably 4 or 5 species of pigweed here on my farm. I see cows eating it during various stages of growth, even spiny pigweed. The variety we call hogweed is very palatable. I Googled it and found no comment that it was poison.

Google pigweed toxicity in cattle. Tons of articles. Here's one. https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmed ... S-44-W.pdf

 

[angus9259]

My fields have pigweed too - where we feed hay. The cattle all enjoy it. It's when it becomes too much of the diet the cattle develop nitrate poisoning. That's what happened here. The bull was going into a paddock with grass and a lot of pigweed. I put out a bale of first cutting hay as well. He at the grass so I decided to mow the pigweed so he would focus on they hay. I don't think he cared for the hay so he ate the mowed pigweed somewhat exclusively. That's when you get in trouble.

I don't actually imagine that pigweed toxicity is a problem ever for ranchers. But I'm sure they must have problems I don't - maybe even WORSE problems. I'm just not sure how they do it - keep everyone alive. That was the point of the post.

Perhaps, as Supta may be suggesting, they don't. They just don't have the opportunity to care so much. They have enough animals that they don't miss some that strangle themselves in crooks of trees (yes, been there too), die having twins, snakebite, black buzzards, etc....

 

[Margonme]

I didn't know pigweed was poisonous. I have some in the pasture and never had any trouble with it. I even remember an old Jersey milk cow we had years ago that loved the stuff. If I'd cut it with a hoe and throw it over the fence she'd be there to grab it. I never could understand how she could eat it with the thorns, but she would.

There are probably 4 or 5 species of pigweed here on my farm. I see cows eating it during various stages of growth, even spiny pigweed. The variety we call hogweed is very palatable. I Googled it and found no comment that it was poison.

Google pigweed toxicity in cattle. Tons of articles. Here's one. https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmed ... S-44-W.pdf

Thanks. Says it is associated with nitrate poisoning. I sure don't like it. It grows in a few areas.

 

[HDRider]

Pigweed around here is immune to Roundup.

 

[jcarkie]

The fewer you have you tend to baby and over feed when you get more you treat them like cattle. It's
Like cell phones how did we survive just fine and we didn't miss important stuff then either

 

[creekdrive]

Sorry you are having such a bad run angus9259. There will always be some that don't make it or have problems. No matter how many head of cattle you have, all you can do is try to keep on top of things and deal with them when they happen. I always aim for 100% living but I doubt it's ever going to happen. Knock on wood so far this year has been pretty good - we are at roughly 2% total death loss counting all animals (not just calves - just calves is more like 5%). One day this summer I was checking pastures and found 2 calves with foot rot, 1 with pinkeye & 1 with an ear infection, all in different pastures - days like that will test anyone...

Around here the larger operations are probably more on top of things than the smaller guys (<100 head). For us we have to be on top of things or the bills may not get paid. There's a lot of guys around here that say they don't have problems but they are the same guys that haul them out to pasture, have no records of how many or anything, bring them home in the fall and they don't even realise if they are short 1 or 2 animals - but they don't have any problems...
A couple years ago our vet phoned us and asked if we could keep an eye out for some calves they were missing (they have pasture bordering our land). We kept an eye out for a few days, called him back and said we hadn't seen anything. His reply - don't worry about it, we think maybe we hauled a few dry cows there but we don't know how many so we probably aren't missing anything.

I'm about to go on a cow checking run right now - I haven't been to any pastures in a week - some closer to 2 weeks. Only checking we've done is from the road on the way to the combine. I hope I don't find any problems.

angus9259 - I hope the rest of your calving season goes smoothly and you see more good than bad!

 

[angus9259]

The fewer you have you tend to baby and over feed when you get more you treat them like cattle.

Again, I have no idea how this applies to this thread. Unless you're suggesting that if you just leave your cattle alone and don't "baby" (whatever that means) then you won't have any problems with them and thereby never need to check them for illness or injury?

 

[regolith]

The fewer you have you tend to baby and over feed when you get more you treat them like cattle.

Again, I have no idea how this applies to this thread. Unless you're suggesting that if you just leave your cattle alone and don't "baby" (whatever that means) then you won't have any problems with them and thereby never need to check them for illness or injury?

Anyone can have a run of bad luck.

The statement kind of does apply in theory, but I can say I've never practised that theory. I cull on health problems without asking too hard why the health issues arose, but I *do* get out there and observe the cows at calving and deal with problems asap and use whatever means I've got to hand to prevent problems.
Again, I never got to the point of practising this, but I managed an organic farm for a while and one of the theories was that some cows just aren't suited to being farmed organically. You hear farmers saying they have no problems with their cattle, but then you start hearing the stories about how terrible the first few years are, watching all these 'unsuited' cattle turn their feet up or get culled.
Which is basically what happened in my herd, but I never really thought it was about the cattle being unsuited to the environment, I was having to cull that ones that could least handle being starved because a) the soil fertility was run down to the point the farm couldn't grow grass and b) I'd been lied to about how many cows the farm could graze and what had happened to the previous dairy herd on the farm (it died of starvation).
Still considering this theory of herd adaptation, I have this big logical problem with putting 'survival of the fittest' into practise and creating a herd that never has any issues with its environment. And that's the percentage of the genetics that I control - with bulls bought in from other herds, or AI, I select from 50% (the cows) for my specific environment and their suitability for that environment is continually being diluted in their daughters by bought-in sires *unless* I choose to breed from the best within the herd and forgo outside genetics. Of course picking bulls from a similar environment will help, but it's not equivalent to selecting bulls from the best within the herd.

From what I've read, pursuing a 'survival of the fittest' philosophy does work, eventually. Obviously there are still losses, but they are not deemed important or too numerous by the cattle owner.
I don't see how you can push above average in anything - if that is your goal - by leaving nature to run your cattle operation.
On the other hand, nature is far wiser than we sometimes give her credit for. You saved the mother of the twins, and likely saved the cow with mastitis
but nature can also work in unexpected ways. Did you know that nearly half of all mastitis cases 'self-cure' thanks to the cow's own immune function, and that dairymen who treat every case with antibiotics tend to presume it was the antibiotic that worked? I had a cow down for three days a year ago, got the vet to her twice the vets were saying it was milk fever & I've seen tons of milk fever & was saying that's not the main problem. She got up on her own, the day before her blood results came back, without ever having been treated for the infection that was evident in the bloods.

1 in 20 malpresentations sounds high, but it doesn't really get much less than that - I pull about the same number a lot of years, though this year I've only had one for 130 calved, another year it might be ten. Haven't counted up the stillbirths this year but I know we lost a couple to bad weather, found one heifer licking off a dead one, she's fine, you just never know with those ones if it was backwards or already dead or just a bit too long calving, even with regular checks. I like to think I've done well if there's no more than six calves leave the farm as skins, but in reality there's nothing I do or don't do that changes the outcomes of these ones. Maybe if I looked at them every five minutes instead of every five hours...
You're definitely due a change in luck.

 

[regolith]

sorry for the long post, but I guess I've spent some time wondering pretty much what you posted.

I worked as a lambing assistant a couple of times as a student. One of those, we lambed the sheep in pens indoors, ensured they were mothered up, turned them out into sheltered areas... just opposite were steep hills covered in sheep that were also lambing. If a storm blew through at lambing time, the farm I was on might lose a few the hills opposite might lose everything under a week old.
I guess the people who owns each piece of land is content with the way in which they manage it.

 

[Boots]

We've been trying to catch this pair for 3 weeks. The hiefer went over a panel and through a fence when we trapped the calves of this place last month. We just turned the cow back out as she is gentle enough. Calf will honk up but has refused to go anywhere near the trap since.
Husband called yesterday in the heat of the day to say he had her. He built a drive through trap and finally she came through it with cows.

 

[Aaron]

Well I just finished my fall calving last night and it will go down in the books as the worst calving season ever, maybe for anyone. Initially started out this spring with 21 potential to calve. Knock out 4 opens, down to 17. Heifer decides to abort, must have been in early summer, and comes into heat a month ago. Does the tango with another bred cow and causes her to abort. Down to 15. Heifer decides to calve early with what I bet was a backwards calf. Down to 14. One heifer suspiciously looks to be open - no bag and less than a month to go. Palpate and bump at same time, nothing - down to 13. 2 backwards calves in a row, manage to save them with great effort. Down to 11. One of the best young cows decides to calve. Calves at 5:30 pm, cleans and calf sucks. Does a uterine prolapse around 9 pm. Vet finally gets out after surgery around 11:30 pm. Finally back in, drugged up, sewed up by 1 am. Go back out to check at 2 am and everything is back out, back end is a mess with torn stitches. Bullet to the head and now we are down to 10. Knew one cow had twins, she was enormous. She calves midnight one night, lively heifer calf, and dopey bull. About 200 lbs of calf in her. Bull dies that morning. Down to 9. And the one last night decided to have a backwards calf as well that just barely saved. So out of 21 potential cows, I had 8 that did not cause me any grief.

Don't know how many fall calving seasons I have went without helping a single animal. Worst I ever had was a couple of backwards calves in the last 15 years.

Bottom line: You either become very comfortable with death in this business or you will lose your mind.

 

[Stocker Steve]

Tough season Aaron.

 

[Nesikep]

Aaron, that sounds strikingly like our first season with a dozen first time heifers... Should have had 12 cows and 12 calves, had 8 cows and 7 calves by weaning time.. it was a rude awakening to the greenhorns we were at the time.. couple years later just about every calf had scours and we lost a bunch there too. Hope next year is better for you!