Preconditioned cattle usually aren't, says John Peirce, and it doesn't take very long after they arrive at a feedyard to know exactly how much preconditioning they didn't receive.
“Every pen of calves gives you a report card on its health-management background,” he says, and the grade is given in dollars and cents. If Peirce were a schoolteacher, he'd give the cattle industry an “F” for its performance with a vaccine gun.
He already does, in a sense. He says AzTx Cattle Company, a cattle feeding and ranching enterprise in Hereford, TX, no longer buys calves through preconditioned calf sales, because they aren't worth the premium they bring.
In fact, the AzTx veterinarian says 80% of cow-calf producers do a poor job of preparing their calf crops for the challenges that lie in their future.
How does he know this? From working with thousands of calves touted as being preconditioned, but in fact really weren't.
The reason? Preconditioned calves, to some extent, are vaccinated with what amounts to little more than sterile water, due to improper handling of modified-live vaccines. And when those calves get to a feedyard, they fall apart. In short, Peirce says, most ranchers aren't vaccinating their calves, they're shooting blanks.
His goal is to change that. AzTx has initiated a supply-chain alliance called AzTx Branded Beef. It's designed to link cow-calf producers with AzTx feedyards, and help cattlemen realize the full value of their calf crops.
And it all starts, Peirce says, at the end of a vaccine gun.
“I don't think we can buy our way out of the health dilemmas that affect our cattle. I think we have to go back to the basics and then perform these basics perfectly — appreciating the fragile nature of modified live viral vaccines and then critically handle and administer these products.”
For example, he was on a New Mexico cow-calf ranch recently. “A 50-dose vaccine bottle was repeatedly exposed to sunlight. The 50-cc pistol grip gun stayed out in the sun until it was empty. The last half of the calves vaccinated from this bottle likely received sterile water.”
Peirce says this ranch spent the same money as someone who takes care of the vaccine, yet they got little to nothing in return for their efforts to prepare those calves for the next phase of their lives. “Generally speaking, the bottom 20%, performance-wise, can account for as much as 80% of any red ink” in the feedyard, he says. “Removing the bottom 20% can enhance profit potential 30-70%. A key performance issue is the quality of the immune system of each individual calf.”
A little attention to the basics, he says, can go a long ways toward giving that bottom 20% the boot. Here's the protocol that Peirce uses with the ranches that participate in the AzTx Branded Beef alliance:
