GoWyo
Well-known member
Well last spring was a SOB. March-mid-May was cold, windy, no pasture due to 2022 drought, feeding grass hay one day and alfalfa the next (which I usually do, but had to feed twice as much $250/ton hay with no pasture to speak of), cows were skinny. Mid-May things perked up with a bunch of rain, but slow to grow since it was cold. Grass was washy when it finally came on around May 20. Cows just started to pick up condition about the end of May when we put CIDRs in then AI bred June 5-9 on observed heats. Summer pastures were generally good, but with all the rain from about May 10 til 4th of July grass still didn't have its usual kick. AI rate was only about 60% and I only sync'd up about 60% of the cows for AI. Several must have lost pregnancies at around 6 weeks because I had a few cows cycling in mid-July to August. With 40% of the cows going directly out with the bulls, they are still slow calving, so it appears a lot of cows didn't settle until June 20-July 20. Pulled bulls on one pasture in early August and had several opens. The pastures that I didn't pull bulls even had a couple opens. With all the culled opens, I kept 4 later calving cows (May-June calvers) just because economically they will pull their freight under these calf prices. Best answer is these cows were under quite a bit of nutritional and weather stress in the spring of 2023 and I think we had some herd improvement on fertility in tough times.
