Bigfoot":3hr767hw said:
Everybody is skipping over the loss of income when you hold back several heifers. With every one of them worth 12 13 even 14 hundred dollars, it gets in your pocket to keep very many. If you want to see true growth in your herd, it has to come at the expense of annual income.
That's the big problem with trying to grow a small herd.. In order to achieve any significant growth, you have to settle on making NO income from the cows.. so you need another source.
Once you have a certain herd size, you should be able to retain the same percentage of heifers with less effect on your income because you have a better profit margin.
Growth has to be looked at in percentages.. growing from 20 to 30 isn't much different than growing from 200 to 300.. it's a 50% increase, and it's not hard to do in about a 4 year span... Growing from 30 to 100 is a much much longer process, and part of the problem is that getting too zealous keeping shoddy replacements early is they won't live long enough to see the 100 head herd, and their daughters won't be much good either, meaning a lot more than expected culling before you get to your goal... If you're only growing from 30 to 50, it doesn't matter much, because even not so good cows will live to see it, and once you're there, you'll have other replacements of better quality anyhow.. Yes, you will still have a higher cull rate for a while, but at least you'll have reached your capacity.
This comes from experience.. 23 years into this herd, starting out with 12 cows, we kept a bunch of crappy stock to increase our herd.. some of what we kept looked great, but had hidden problems (prolapses, bad udders, and hooves) surface as they got older.. We've had to cull a ton of animals at 5-8 years old because of it, and when only 1 our of every 3 or 4 heifers really turns out, you just can't get anywhere with the growth.. Once we finally weeded out the bad lines and stuck with it, even the not-so-good cows are lasting well enough, though they may not produce as much as we'd like, and we consider them terminal. Now, FINALLY, growth is much easier.. I have about 20 good cows (out of 27), and wouldn't have a hard time being at 30 in 3 or 4 years.