Lucked Out

[Cibster]

Well, my last heifer just calved.......at 16 months old. Yah, didn't see that one coming until about 3 months ago when I was really starting to heat check so I could get heifers bred early. Wasn't seeing her come into heat and she seemed to be carrying a lot of middle so I decided to reach in and.....bump.....there's a good sized calf. Luckily she calved just fine on her own. Had a 65# bull calf. The scoop on her is that she is an ET calf. I had some embryo's in my uncle's tank and he had a cow come in and asked if I wanted him to put one of my embryo's in her so I said go for it. Well, I guess he had a 10-month old bull running with his cows in a certain pasture where this heifer calf was and he got her bred. Both the heifer and bull were purebred Gelbvieh so just goes to show their early maturing. He brought the heifer over on September 1st and I lutalysed all my heifers a couple weeks later. She must have been far enough along that the lut didn't kick it. Heifer and calf are doing great and she has a really nice udder. I just hope it doesn't stunt her too badly. I've had heifers calf early, but never at 16 months! Guess I got lucky this time!

 

[Nesikep]

Good to hear she had it OK. I found the same thing with the Gelbvieh, Last year I had 3 heifers come into heat at 190 days old, one got bred by the big bull, the other two were luckily away from him already. If she's got really good bloodlines, perhaps if you can move her to fall calfing for next year, and spring the year after (so she has a calf every 18 months for a while) she'd do OK... I don't like having cows open for an entire year... too much mooing and hassle when they're always in heat, and despite she's ahead of the game, leaving her open a full year sounds wasteful to me, since it'll then take 2 years until you have a calf on the ground again.