What percentage do y'all...

[Bigfoot]

I don't like to break over past 10%, but the goal is zero of course. i even lose a mature cow every now and then. One afternoon this week, I was checking the cows and saw something strange. A cow laying in a real peculiar way. She was right in the edge of the woods. Went to see what was up. She must have been scratching on a sapling. Somehow fell, with the sapling wrapped around her leg. She'd been down like that most of the day. Rectum forced out, and bloated. Like to have never got her up, but she seems to be more vivacious everyday.

 

[mooboy]

Sometimes a bad result happens that does not have anything to do with the bull's genetics or the cow's genetics. We live in the hill country of Tennessee and deep gullies are common where hillsides join. It is also common for these gullies to be lined with trees so they are a natural place for cows to congregate during the heat of the day. One of our heifers did a fine job of delivering a calf and taking care of it. On about the third day after the calf was born she bedded it down near one of these gullies and went out to graze. We had a quick but heavy rain storm roll through one afternoon this August. The calf wound up in the deep part of the ditch and was drowned. What a shame. Some might say it is bad management to leave a heifer with the herd to calf. Mine seem to be happier out in the pasture. Locking a heifer up in the small pens at the bottom of the hills have their disadvantage too. Had a calf freeze to death in a shallow creek that went through a pen one year.

Over time I think my average is about 1 in 10 go sour. This matches what my neighbor told me years ago when he had quite a large herd of brood cows. Some years might turn out a little better and some years are worse.

 

[Nesikep]

I'm at 25 head, so 10% would be between 2 and 3 a year.. I'd consider that a really bad year..
about 5 or 6 years ago I had that happen.. In February, I had a cow have a stroke, took her to the vet, nothing was figured out, in early march she fell and couldn't get herself back up, and I had to put her down... then a 2nd timer delivered a dead calf in a gully, don't know what happened, perhaps the sac was over it's nose?... Same year one of my really good cows had a breech birth heifer born dead after I got it straightened out.. She adopted a twin, and the 2nd timer adopted a calf from a lousy cow that had no milk.. In August she had heatstroke or something and went downhill fast, dead in 3 days no matter what I did... In the fall that year I had to put down my oldest cow because her arthritis was just too bad to get her through another winter... so I guess I lost 3 cows and 2 calves that year, though the oldie I don't really consider a loss.. she didn't owe me anything anymore.

 

[js1234]

Over 95% live wean on calves, less than 2% deathloss on stockers. assume about 1% deathloss on cowherd as on elf the components that goes into how many replacements we keep.

 

[Texas Gal]

I don't believe in witchcraft

That matters not.
It believes in you. You better get 3Way to have a talk with his sister so she don't send the malocchio your way...

GB I wear my asphidity bag at all times. I am fully protected. Ahhhh what an aroma :yuck: :yuck:

I haven't heard or even thought of an asphidity bag in a million years; made me giggle and think of my childhood in the Piney Woods.