BLACKPOWER":2mztrctl said:
txshowmom":2mztrctl said:
How old were they when they were weaned? There is no way they were 205 days.
205 is an adjusted weight, since not all calves can be born on the same day and not always weaned on the same day this is a way to compare ww fairly. calves older than 205 days when they are weaned have their ww adjusted down, calves younger than 205 days have their ww adjusted up. Take a look at Scotchcap Angus, they routinely wean calves over 900 lbs. 205 weight, an some that big off of First calf heifers. Their is a lot of performance bred into these cattle and A LOT of corn. If you ask me this is way to much performance for a herd trying to become more efficient. For example at the time of breeding you want your heifer calves to be at 65% of the mature weight your aiming for. If you wean a heifer calf at 800 lbs the first of November and she gains 1.5 lbs(pretty conservative) for 6 months (breed her the first of May) thats an additional 270lbs bringing her weight up to 1070 lbs. If this is 65% of her mature weight essentially she will be a 1700 lb cow. This is to big for any environment especially in a drought challenged area. The Angus industry for years and years selected for performance to compete with the exotic craze that hit the country. They caught up and with costs going up your seeing a push back to more moderate framed easy fleshing cattle. All the performace in the world won't help you unless you keep the feedbunk full. In closing a man has to ask himself , Is the added pounds on my calves worth the added costs of inputs needed to maximize weaning weight? For any farmers reading this it is essentially the same relationship between deciding how much Nitrogen to put on and yields, you can keep adding inputs but eventually yield increases will plateau to a point where all your gaining is bragging at the coffee shop.
first off, BP, nice post.
my question to you is in your reference to the adj 205 day weights. i'm familiar w adjusted weights & know how they work, but i'm wondering are you implying that they weaned early & had them adjusted up?
i'm not discounting the feed-factor (i have no idea if Remitall creeps or not), but even if they are weaning at 5 mos, that'd still have to be a pretty big 5-month weight to adjust up to over 1000-lb 205, right?