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As a Nutritionist, I often field questions from cattlemen on calf scours, weak calves and other calving time disasters. Most all of these questions come after the problem has already set in. While we cannot control the weather that will play a large role in stressing newly born claves, we can control the management of stress in our herds.  

Providing more than just “adequate” facilities/pastures for calving is one management tool that will pay dividends when trying to prevent a scours outbreak. If you are calving in or around buildings, providing a clean, dry area for the cows and calves is essential. A buildup of manure or moisture, as well as other calves that may be sick, are your worst enemies if you calve in a small area. If you calve in pastures, you can reduce the pathogen load normally seen in smaller lots or around buildings. In addition, the University of Nebraska Sandhills Calving System may provide even greater protection to newly born claves. In short, this system suggests you move the pregnant cows to a new pasture every two weeks or so. By leaving the cows with calves behind, you minimize the pathogens that can affect newly born calves in the new pasture.

Nutrition is also a management tool we all control. For spring calving cows, most forages are deficient in the trace minerals and vitamins necessary for production of good quality colostrum. Supplementation of trace minerals, vitamins and phosphorus is then absolutely essential to building the quality of colostrum that will provide the calf with a robust immune system necessary to avoid scours. Supplementation should start at least six weeks prior to calving and may be required all winter (for protein) if low quality forages are used. If you wait until scours become an issue, you will have waited too long. It takes weeks of proper nutrition to build quality colostrum.

In recent years, we have seen a number of supplements with Altech’s^®  Bio-Mos^® become available to cattlemen to use pre-calving through the end of calving. Bio-Mos^® is a mannan oligosaccharide (mos) that attaches to harmful bacteria in the gut of cattle. It has been suggested that this attachment renders the bacteria harmless as it can no longer cause damage to the gut wall.

If you are worried about colostrum quality, take steps to provide some nutritional insurance. CRYSTALYX^® Brand Supplements are an easy way to affordably provide protein, trace minerals, vitamins, phosphorus and Bio-Mos^® in a supplement block that’s available 24/7, while minimizing your investment in time, labor and equipment.    

I often hear cattlemen say, “With the cost of hay so high, I cannot afford to also buy a supplement.” If a supplement makes sense in your operation with lower priced forage, it only makes more “cents” with higher priced forage.

When we buy a supplement, most of us want to know what sort of payback we get from it. Supplements replace nutrients that are either missing or only available in lower than desired quantities in the base diet/forage. Supplements can also provide performance enhancing additives that are not available naturally. Supplements can provide a third return—their ability to modify the grazing distribution of the herd in a pasture. This is best accomplished by self-fed supplements that are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

These three benefits “pay” you back for the cost of the supplements, generally with increased gain, better health/reproductive performance, or more efficient production overall. The payback can vary from supplement to supplement and situation to situation. 

Providing supplemental crude protein to low quality forages will boost the digestibility (release of energy). It is not uncommon for supplemental crude protein to increase the digestibility of a low quality forage by 10 percent. This gives you 10 percent more energy from every ton of forage or, theoretically, you could feed 10 percent less of the forage and achieve the same performance. Either way, you have 10 percent more forage energy than if you chose not to feed a supplement. Ten percent of $150/ton forage will always be worth more than 10 percent of $50/ton forage.

If you have two trucks and only have room to put one in a shed ahead of an oncoming hailstorm, which do you choose? The new truck worth $50,000 or the old one worth $15,000? Just as your reward today for saving a single 600 pound calf that gets sick at weaning is worth over $950 versus around $680 three years ago, your payback for using a supplement on $150 forage is far greater than on $50 forage.

CRYSTALYX^® Brand Supplements, available to your herd 24/7, are an excellent way to increase the payback from your forage, no matter the forage cost. Just remember that your payback increases as your forage cost increases.

Fall can be a very busy time of the year for Cattlemen. Weaning, harvesting and attending to children and grandchildren in school activities are just a few of the opportunities that take up our time as we prepare for Winter. For those of you with spring calving herds, Fall also offers an additional opportunity to put weight on cows – cheaply. 

After weaning, and before the cold temperatures of Winter arrive, cows have a relatively low maintenance energy requirement (compared to Winter or lactation). This means that more of the forage they consume goes into weight gain. Add to this, a CRYSTALYX^® protein supplement, and you can put even more weight on those cows ahead of Winter. Most forage grazed in the Fall is mature or dormant. It is not uncommon to increase the digestibility of such forage by 10%, with the addition of a protein supplement. This increased digestibility of the forage will also allow the cow to consume more forage. This double increase (forage digestibility and forage intake) greatly increases the weight gain you can see in your cows this Fall.

With your time at a premium in the Fall, a self-fed supplement like CRYSTALYX^® offers you another win-win program. When properly stocked, barrels of CRYSTALYX^® should last from 2 to 3 weeks. This greatly minimizes the time (labor) and expense of delivering a supplement. As noted earlier, you likely have other things to attend to. 

With your cow herd well into gestation, you are already investing in your 2012 calf crop every day. Next year’s calves should be as, or even more valuable than this year’s calf crop. Take care of those calves by putting more weight on your cows this Fall. This will give you cows in better condition for calving next spring. Cows in better condition at calving will have healthier calves and breed back quicker. You can do all this right now without investing a lot of time in getting it done.

In one of his recent blogs, Dan Colling explained the “large” benefit that you can get from a “small” amount of protein supplement on dry or mature pastures.

This week I’d like to talk about another benefit of self-fed protein supplements. While this benefit of CRYSTALYX^® does impact the nutritional status of your herd, it is primarily a behavioral modification of your cattle.

We have known for years that cattle will seek out palatable supplements, and even salt, in pastures.  Research by Dr. Derek Bailey at Havre, MT, has actually quantified this effect. It shows low-moisture block (LMB) supplements, like CRYSTALYX^®, to be much more effective than salt alone at luring cattle to underutilized areas of pastures.

From the table below, we can see that grazing cattle spent a larger percentage of their total time within 100, 400 and 600 yards of LMB (CRYSTALYX^®) and salt than just salt alone. This difference was found to be statistically significant.

During periods of drought, or when grasses naturally mature (as with stockpiled forage) CRYSTALYX^®  can offer you two distinct advantages:

1.) It can increase the digestibility of a low quality forage

2.) It will lure your cattle to the underutilized areas of a pasture where they may not normally travel to. 

During periods of drought, naturally occurring sources of water may dry up. This can leave many pastures with areas that cattle avoid due to lack of water. Research has shown cattle will travel over a mile from a water source, to consume CRYSTALYX^®. While the cattle are there, they will also graze the adjacent forage.

Does your current supplement multi-task? CRYSTALYX^® does. Put the CRYSTALYX^® benefits from nutrition and behavior to work for you.  

CRYSTALYX^® Brand self-fed supplements are an excellent way to maximize your returns from a supplement program that’s available 24/7, while minimizing your investment in time, labor and equipment.

Most cattlemen realize the advantages of using a mineral supplement for grazing cattle in the summer. Most cattlemen are also aware that, in the fall, a protein supplement will greatly improve the utilization of mature grass.

So, at what point between summer and fall should one start using a protein supplement versus just a mineral supplement? The technical answer would be when the grass cannot supply adequate protein for the animal. For grazing yearlings this would be when crude protein of the grass falls under 12%. For the lactating cow, the level of crude protein required will be greatly impacted by her level of milk production, and will generally decrease over the summer months.

Roughly, it will drop from 11% at the beginning of the summer to 8% or lower prior to weaning. Unless you are able to sample grass, and test it for crude protein content, this still does not tell you when you could see a benefit from using a protein supplement on grass.

There is one thing you can easily do, and that is observe the maturity of the grass in your pastures. Once grass shoots a seed head, crude protein content and digestibility decline rapidly. We must remember that drought will further hasten this decline as well. As grass becomes mature and begins to lose its green color, you are most certainly in a satiation where protein supplements will provide a boost to cattle performance.  This is likely to be earlier in the summer with yearling cattle than with beef cows.

The table below will give you some idea how fast the forage quality will decline in just a months’ time.

Self-fed protein supplements can greatly increase forage utilization in late summer and fall. Depending on the form of supplement used, costs can range between 30 and 60 cents per head per day (including delivery costs).  They can also draw cattle into underutilized areas of a pasture to further “stretch” that pasture. Both of these attributes of self-fed supplements are very beneficial when drought conditions exist.

Most all cattlemen easily understand the direct impact conception rate has on their bottom line. Another measure that can directly affect ranch profitability is calving distribution. While pregnancy checking may give us a good indication of what our conception rate is (number of cows pregnant divided by the number of cows exposed), we will likely need to wait until calving to get a better feel for our calving distribution. 

So, what is “calving distribution”, and why should I be concerned with it? Calving distribution is a look at which cycle of your breeding season each of your calves are born. If you have a 60-day breeding season, you have about three, 21-day cycles, to get your cows bred. If you keep track of the birthdates of your calves, you can then generate the calving distribution of your calves. You can now look at the percentage of your calves that are born in each of the 3 breeding cycles in this 60-day breeding season.  

Why would this matter? Harlan Hughes has put together a graph in Figure 1, showing the relative profitability of when a calf is born within the calving distribution of a herd.

I have heard ranchers tell of herds where 65 percent of the calves are born in the first 21 days, as well as herds where 85 percent of the calves were born in the first 21 days.  It is entirely possible that both of these herds have the same conception rate, yet one is likely to be more profitable. Let’s say both herds are 100 cows and 95 percent of the cows were pregnant. If the ranches were only measuring conception rate, they are likely to be equally happy at this point. Let’s also say 3 percent of the live calves were lost by the time they were weaned. This gives us 92 live calves per herd to sell at weaning.

Will the checks for both herds be the same? Probably not. The second herd has 18 more calves born in the first cycle than the first herd (92 x 65% = 60 calves and 92 x 85% = 78 calves). If those 18 calves gain 2.5 pounds a day for an extra 21 days before they are weaned, they have added 945 pounds more pay weight than the first herd.  That could total over $1,400 more in your paycheck. And that herd probably has calves moving from the third cycle to the second cycle as well. Each cow that conceives a cycle earlier, can add about $78 more to your bottom line. Regardless of when a cow conceives, the cost to carry her for a year will be pretty much the same.  She should just as well conceive earlier, and deliver a heavier calf.

Now, just how do you get a calving distribution more like the second herd than the first?  Nutrition, genetics and management are the tools you have at your disposal. You may still have time to optimize any of these before your 2012 calves are conceived.