Catching late calvers up

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Dusty Britches

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I have 2 six year old cows that calved about six weeks after the rest of the herd and was wondering what the best way is to catch them up. They are both in excellent body condition (6+) so I was thinking on day 20 post calving give them a lutalyse shot.

Any advice?
 
If they are in good condition I have moved them up 60 days. However, if they were on good feed and bred late for no good reason, they may not fit their environment and keeping them will perpetuate the problem. Like TC says, pick the date you want to be finished calving and send the ones that haven't calved down the road for decent money.
 
Or you can put a CIDR in them about 50-60 days after calving. That should get anestrous cows cycling.
 
Financially it is impractical. Cows should be considered as employees. If your hired help showed up late for work 6 weeks late how would
you handle it?
 
In most situations I would agree but I've had a few that were later due to doing all AI and my work schedule
 
Lutalyse won't bring them on heat unless they are already cycling and at 20 days it is unlikely they will be cycling. I would just give them every opportunity by having them in good condition and exposing them to a good working bull. You can try cidrs and lutalyse further down the track maybe around the 50 day mark if there has been no action for the bull but I prefer to just leave it up to the bull. Synchronising for AI is good if it works but if you miss you just lost another 3 weeks.

Ken
 
I have had pretty good luck moving my herd calving dates up from calving in Feb,-March to starting now in mid Dec. Seemed like I could move up about 3 weeks per year. insert CIDR at about 50 days for 7 days and Lute when removing CIDR. you should be able to insert CIDR at 40 days and still have pretty good luck. I used all AI and bred on visual standing heat. I do not have much experience with bull with beef cows but dairy farmers that used bulls mentioned that if more than two or three cows would come into heat at the same time, the bull may only breed one or two and not the others (maybe not as pretty.) If that is the case, you may want to stagger the heats into a few days apart. Like other post, it may be easier to just replace late calfers with ones that fit the rest of your herd. Good luck. In my case, I would have had to replace the whole herd and it would have been less challenging.
 
I insert a Cidr at 45 days post calving on anything I want to move up. As long as there is good mineral and good grass I can typically move one 25-30 days each year.
 
Put with a bull. Keep if bred to produce market calves. If open, ship. If you need to sell some later, sell them in 3 trimester as bred cows. If you keep them and they do not return to the season next time mark them as cows to never have calves as potential replacements. Wear them out producing market calves.
 
To be honest, we do not do anything special with our late calvers. Most of our herd will calve within the first 30-40 days of the calving season, but we would have the occasional calve 6-8 weeks after everything else. Once we shortened our breeding season to 60 days, they either slowly caught up with the rest of the herd, or came up open and were sold. We have had some females jump forward 6 weeks between calves, but it was normally 3-4 weeks earlier each year in our experience.
 
Timed heat sync may help. Our last cow to calve last year is going to be one of the first ones this year. She calved April 8th and should calve sometime after Feb 20th with the AI group. We timed heat synch everything last year and she surprisingly came in heat and stuck to AI service. She's 8 years old and in good condition so that probably helped. We've had cows jump up 6 weeks before. Typically though we set a date we want to be done calving by and pull the pull out accordingly. If late calvers can't breed back and stay within our preferred calving season then they get sold if they come up open. We're probably a lot more strict about keeping a tighter calving season now that we are down to about 10-12 head so mid to late April is about all we will keep the bull out for but when we were calving out 20-30 head about May 15th to 20th was the absolute latest we would even consider holding one over to calve that late.

Our breeding/calving season now is to time heat sync with CIDRs most if not all our cows and breed some AI to calve the last week of Feb then everything goes out with the bull. This year we'll start calving in about a week (hopefully not sooner than this coming weekend with this crappy cold weather) and should be done by April 1st. Usually if they don't cycle with the timed heat or stick to the AI service they usually get bred 3 weeks later with the bull so makes for a nice and tight calving season with mostly 2 waves of calves with maybe a few sprinkled in before and after that 2nd heat cycle. If you are diligent about setting a cut off date when you want to be done calving by then you basically sell off anything that can't maintain a calving interval in your desired calving season and you don't have the problem about what to do with late calvers.
 

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