Welcome to CT....
My first question is... what is your cattle experience? Seriously, this is a very important question...
Here in the western part of Va . there are not that many 3-4 light wts sold... Unless it is getting very dry/drought.... there is no real good reason for a farmer to pull calves off their cows that light. You are also looking at the highest per pound cost of cattle... around here they have been in the high $4 to $5 per lb. Are you an experienced enough cattleman to take the loss of $1500 per head if you lose a few?
Agree with what
@Ky hills , posted above. You need to get to know the local owner of the closest stockyard or 2... Calves are in short supply, so high demand, and they will cost, and there are often several buyers at most yards that you will be competing with. My suggestion is go to a couple of the local sales, and just watch and listen.... see who is buying what... get a feel for the overall situation.
We buy a few bull calves to bring home and work and be able to add them to our own calves to make bigger loads. But we stay away from any 3 wts and seldom even touch any light 4 wts...
And we only buy "single owner" groups when we buy groups.... all the calves in that group come from the same farm, same germs; we have bought some of the co-mingled "graded" pens and have had major problems with sickness several times... Mostly we buy 4-10 or so and get them settled in for a week before adding any more into the group.
We grow sorghum-sudan and sometimes put it in the bunk but more often make hay... we grow corn and chop and put in the bunk. It feeds the calves we background; ours and bought ones, up to about 575 and then usually sell. Most of our calves coming off the cows are in the 450-500 wt range... We background for 45-90 days, depending...
I think you are expecting too much gain especially through the winter, but then you would normally be warmer down there compared to here in the western part of VA.
@kenny thomas would be a possible source for information... he has been dealing and buying/selling cattle for a long time besides running his own herd...
Thank you farmerjan for stating some very important details. I agree, when I read the original post, that it was going to be hard to get those expectations for gain especially in winter, but I am not familiar with sorghum grass. I have a have gotten similar gain to that over winter, around 2 pounds, but it was with grain feeding on the heavy side to push some heifers along for spring breeding.
Soy hulls were apart of that ration, along with corn gluten, and cracked corn, for a short while the ration was a different amount of those ingredients instead of 1/3 each and dried distillers grain was added.
One year I fed rice hulls and didn’t get too good of results,
I agree not many of those 3 weights to be found, and also they may not be the best growing calves eiither, maybe they were pulled off the cow early, maybe they were poor growers.
I’ve bought a few that size, but just small numbers and watched them real close and been ok, but yeah that large of a group would be hard to put together and harder to get started.
My parents used to buy 400# calves around 80-100 head, over 40 years ago.
That was a popular size at the sales back then as I believe that most calves weaned off in that right around 400 pound range
Now I believe it’s 500 weights that are the most common. The buyers that have bought for me, and that also run feeder/stocker calves say they like to buy 500-600 lb calves, because they have less problems with them.
My parents would buy some calves at the area graded sales back then and generally they’d have to doctor quite a few and mist years list a few I remember one year they lost 4.
Graded sales are not done as much right around here now. There are some special ones like the Hereford Influence sale we recently sold at, and there is another one that is on by one of the stockyards, but all of those now require calves to have 2 rounds of vaccinations one can be a killed vaccine, but second round has to be modified live vaccine for certain things
The calves have to be weaned a minimum of 45-60 days depending on each sales specific requirements.
Sometimes it’s required that they be feed bunk broke, and drinking from a waterer.
When buying 500 pound heifers to resell as bred heifers I’ve often bought at those kinds of sales and most time it’s worked out good. One time I did have some issues with a couple calves that the seller had evidently not been honest about as they were definitely not weaned, and I did have to treat them for respiratory illness.
The word was that they disallowed that individual from consigning anymore cattle to future sales.
But yes as far as buying through regular comingled graded sales, I would be very wary of that unless it was a fairly small group and I was prepared to babysit the calves and treat them at the slightest sign of a problem.
On a side note, my parents had a fast learning curve from a bad experience. The first bunch of calves they bought, they just unloaded and turned out into a 80 acre field. Those unweaned calves went everywhere, in the road and everywhere else. I was too young to remember it but I often heard the horror story of it. So I like to start smaller bunches in a barn for a week or so and then move them to a small but bigger lot for another week or so, before turn out.
That way I can watch for sickness, get them weaned and used to feed and used to me feeding them. It makes managing them a lot easier.
