In the 80's-90's when I had registered Charolais, they were the American purebred type and not the full French full bloods, but they still very high birthweights compared to cattle here at present.
The Charolais cattle at that time were better calving than in previous decades when they first came into popularity.
They still had high birthweights but were somewhat refined by then.
I consistently had birthweights of 100#+.
Very small percentage was under 100#, and we considered anything under 100# to be low birthweight.
Most of our heifers had 90-110 calves at 23-24 months old with less than 10% requiring assistance. That was before the days of EPD's, we tried to select bulls with smooth shoulders for use in heifers.
My cows were in the range of 1450-1800# and the birthweights ranged from 60# to 135#. Only 2 60# calves and one of them was a twin to an 88# calf, the other was a calf from an older cow. I don't think we ever had any calves in the 70-<85 range. Very common to have 110-120#, had two at 150. On the larger calves by certain bulls there would be what our vet at the time called dummy calves that would be slow to get up and nurse I'd have to help them along. Surprisingly one of the 135 calves was lively from the start.
I remember a popular Charolais show bull at the time was advertised as having 150# BW.
As I believe it was
@coachg mentioned, I've come to believe that getting a calf on the ground unassisted and with minimal stress to the cow is beneficial as far as rebreeding in a timely fashion as well as less stressful on the calf. At that time with that herd of Charolais we had to assist what would be thought of as a high percentage of cows calving compared to now even though I didn't think it was very high at the time, because that is how it had been. I thought at the time it was mostly due to abnormal birth presentations like foot turn back, or breech birth and not really a hard calving issue due to size of calf, but since then I've wondered if the large calves weren't a lot of the issue causing the abnormal presentations.
Looking back on it we had several prolapse before calving. Vet cited big calves as the little likely reason. Some retained placentas, which in my understanding can be caused by dystocia as well.
That said I think 40-50 lb calves are taking it too extreme and that brings about issues in its own right too.
I'm in no way being critical of the
@lithuanian farmer cattle. They are a different type of cattle selected for different markets than US cattle.
I really like seeing those type cattle.
