Starting out with Dairy bred with SimAngus?

[Son of Butch]

Even if they're free it's not going to pencil out to raise them . Your not going to see a check for 21/2 years and in another year you start thinking about culling them for bad bags.
Doesn't make sense when you can buy bred solid mouth beef cows for 7-800.00 .

When you are first starting out $3,000 for 30 calves is easier to do vs $23,000 for 30
solid mouth cows.

Cull 5 as feeder heifers at 600 lbs at $1 lb and he has his initial $3,000 back and 25 to breed
sell those as breds at 3.5 yrs of age and he will have gotten 2 calf crops out of them.

 

[Stocker Steve]

Stocking with mature cows is usually the lowest cost per acre for a grazing operation. Higher grass consumption per animal and a lower cost per pound. Been there.

But is filling the pasture your primary goal?

May want to cull 25 off grass and retain 5. Depends on your goals...

 

[callmefence]

Even if they're free it's not going to pencil out to raise them . Your not going to see a check for 21/2 years and in another year you start thinking about culling them for bad bags.
Doesn't make sense when you can buy bred solid mouth beef cows for 7-800.00 .

When you are first starting out $3,000 for 30 calves is easier to do vs $23,000 for 30
solid mouth cows.

Cull 5 as feeder heifers at 600 lbs at $1 lb and he has his initial $3,000 back and 25 to breed
sell those as breds at 3.5 yrs of age and he will have gotten 2 calf crops out of them.

Horse apples.
Sell 28 calves in a year at 700.00 and still have the bred cows. You do the math. ;-)

 

[Dave]

Some years back I thought I would get some Holstein beef cross heifers. The idea was to use to raise 3/4 beef 1/4 Holsteins heifers to base a herd on. I will just say it didn't work like planned. I got some week old Simm cross heifers. Raised them up (they got huge) and bred to a calving ease Angus bull. They had huge calves. Had to pull several. One heifer didn't survive that. Some didn't breed back and were sold. By the time they should have all been 5 years old I was down to one cow. She died of wooden tongue. I never did get a heifer calf. I hate to think how much that experiment cost me.

 

[Stocker Steve]

I know a guy who will buy heavily discounted stein X bred heifers at a beef sale. He will sort off the more dairy looking ones and resell them at a dairy sale. :idea: These cover all costs but do not make a profit.

The beefy dairy cross X females raise whopper calves :banana: till they come open at about 5 to 7 years old. They are profitable, in part, because they were very very cheap to purchase. Are you in on this CB?

 

[Dave]

My mistake was raising them from bottle calves. That put too much time and money into the operation. At that time I was getting Holstein bull calves from a small dairy that had been 100% AI for 40+ years. I raised them and sold them to other dairies for breeding bulls. I figured throwing in a few heifers wouldn't change my work load. It did however take way too much time to begin producing.
A blue million years ago I read an article about a guy who ran 80 Holstein Hereford cross cows. He bred to an Angus bull. When they calved he grafted on a Holstein bull calf. So every cow raised twins. He figured on good years the Holstein calf covered expenses and the beef calf was profit. On poor years he figured he was breaking even with the beef calf and the lower value Holstein was the profit. I am sure he had a steady stream of replacements. He also must have been feeding better than the average guy. It was an interesting idea. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

 

[BFE]

As the title suggests, I'm looking at buying calves to start a beef herd. I have a local dairy that breeds all their animals with SimAngus semen and sells the calves.

Would these be decent animals to start a herd with? I know at a sale anything with a dairy frame gets beat up but I don't know if it is ok to start with these cheaper animals and then breed to better semen as they mature.

I'm looking to start with about thirty. The heifers would be to keep and breed while the steers would be raised for a while and then sold.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Not ideal, but it can work to get you started.
Bottle calves will be gentle as cows because they view humans as friends from birth.
The added milk and frame from Holsteins will make them large framed, big eating inefficient cows with too much milk and udder.

Plan to sell them as young cows (before their 3rd calf) before their udders blow.
10 out of 30 will be obvious culls after their 1st calf and 2 or 3 will be good cows for 6 or 7 calves.

As SBMF said, breed them to a short, wide, low milk bull for replacement females.
1 out of 4 of the replacement females will need to be culled in the same manner as their mothers for the same reason and build your herd from there.

Good Luck and :welcome: to the cattle forum board

I appreciate the advice. While definitely not ideal, I do have a pretty unique situation in that I can buy the calves for $100 each and he's going to raise them on milk for 75 days with his calves and wean them for me. He's going to take care of all of their shots and deworm them once before I ever get them.

He is an old family friend and he's going to do it once to help me get started and then I'll be on my own. Thirty weaned calves at 75 days old, even while dairy crosses, still seem like a good deal for $100 each.

He also told me that if I get the animals back to him at breeding age and buy the semen, he'd have his breeders AI them at first service for me.

So, while this probably isn't the ideal way to get into the business in a perfect world; it does seem like almost fail-proof with the first thirty.

The price isn't bad. Give it a shot. You'll need to find a bull for cleanup, they won't all take to AI. I wouldn't be against selling a few bottom enders as breds, especially if money gets tight.

 

[Stocker Steve]

Light pee wee dairy cross calves are about $1/lb here.
Light pee wee straight beef calves are about $2/lb here.

 

[WFfarm]

My dad raised Holstein replacement heifers when I was a kid and our start in the beef business was the result of a frisky few nights by the neighbor's Angus bull. My dad liked a beef cow that had a 1/4 to 1/8 dairy in it. More than that would make a short lived brood cow with udder issues like others have said. But, the oldest cow we ever had was a 1/4 Holstein /Angus cross that we had to put down at 20 years old. She never missed a beat breeding back. It will be hard to breed out the long dairy face on a lot of them.