USDA steer carcass weights

[MoGal]

I think it boils down to people not actually knowing how much their cows really weigh. Beef articles have been saying the average cow is about 1450 lbs.........
Last month I asked the hubby how much he thought "Effie" weighed and he tells me 1150 lbs...... I didn't say anything.

Effie (six years old) has a seven week old calf on her and when the hubby put her on the scale (by herself) there was silence....... and when I asked him how much she weighs, he responded,
"Well, the scale says 1450 lbs"......... this is a state certified scale his boss has so I know its not off by much if any.

While I think a 1200-1300 lb cow is about right...... the majority of our girls will weigh 1400 lbs as they are about the same size.

I wonder how many other folks are out there thinking they have a 1150 lb cow that actually weighs 1450 lbs (and normally my hubby isn't that far off on weights).

To be honest I haven't seen anyone downsizing to smaller framed cattle in this area.

 

[JRGidaho`]

We used to weigh all of our cows every year so we knew what we had to work with. Our average was about 1240 and I considered those to be a little bigger than what I really wanted. I ran a lot of cow efficiency analysis and found about 1180 lb to be our optimum cow size. That means our average cow was bigger than our target optimum. Once you get cows bigger than you want, it is difficult to get them back down to where you might want them to be. Putting some Gelbvieh breeding into them was the worst mistake I made in terms of optimizing our resources. Too much milk and too much frame.

If I were given the choice of either only weigh cows or calves at weaning time, I would always choose to weigh the cows and not worry about the calves. Cow weight and how much they eat (which is proportional to body weight) has far more to do with profitability than does weaning weight.