Leah Peterson on Calving Heifers

On the program again today with our co-host David Woodruff is Clear Creek Ranch Mom, Leah Peterson talking about her cattle operation today. They started off talking about the screw worm.

 

"I've been concerned with the early spring coming with warps all the way south to Texas that keep waiting to hear that that darn thing made its way north."

 

"Well I think Brian had something that he posted somewhere and it sounded like they were pretty well on it in the southwest. I had never heard of it until I talked to the Flakes. I guess I had heard of it but I didn't know it firsthand. How big of a herd, how many cow calf pairs do you have to keep tabs on?"

 

"Well we culled really hard last year. Late moisture that didn't really come until it was time to go to grass. We culled really hard in the spring and so we're down a little bit on numbers currently of mature cows. However we raise our own replacements and so had that discussion multiple times in recent days as we weigh drought planning with trying to restore numbers, but typically somewhere around 500 adult cows on the place that would include heft bread heifers somewhere around there. A lot of people turn up their nose at calving heifers. We make very careful intentional decisions in our breeding programs so that we don't have a battle at calving time but I would rather be raising heifers right now and calving heifers than I would be spending money buying mature bred cows."

~ Clear Creek Ranch mom Leah Peterson.

 

That's it for today's Cattleman's Corner. Thanks again for listening and may God bless. I'm Brian Hale.

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