Media advisory issued November 20, 2002, effective immediately.
For media inquiries, contact Caroline Booth Lara, Communications Specialist, (580) 224-6379.
  email: cblara@noble.org.

How Does Your Herd Measure Up?
Find out by collecting data and comparing it to national averages

ARDMORE, Okla. — By this time of year, most cattle producers have weaned their spring calves. When asked how the calves did, a common answer is, "Well, they weaned at so-many pounds."

"This is like asking a college football addict to describe his team's last game with one statistic," said Billy Cook, Noble Foundation livestock specialist. "There are many factors to tally besides calf weaning weight."

According to Cook, a cow has to perform a few basic tasks to help keep a cattleman in business. These include to become pregnant, give birth to live calves, provide adequate nutrition and care to her calf, rebreed in a timely manner, and raise the calf until it is weaned.

"There is relevant data that you should consider collecting in a natural progression throughout the production system (birth through weaning)," Cook said. "There are also some national averages from the 1997 National Animal Health Monitoring System studies you can compare your herd against."

The NAHMS studies show that 5.5 percent of all calves die before weaning. Of this 5.5 percent, 2.1 percent are born dead, 1.1 percent die within 24 hours of birth, an additional 1.1 percent die within 24 hours of age to 3 weeks old, and 1.2 percent die within three weeks of age to weaning.

"The take-home message here seems simple — pay particularly close attention to your cows and newborn calves at calving and for the first three weeks of life," Cook said.

Another thing to keep tabs on is the number of cows or heifers requiring assistance at birth. The NAHMS study reports that 97.3 percent of cows required no assistance at birth, and only 0.9 percent required a hard pull. A hard pull is defined as any mechanical intervention required to assist calving. When considering heifers, 83.3 percent of heifers required no assistance calving with 5.1 percent requiring a hard pull. The remaining percentage required only minimal assistance.

"This is not earth-shattering news — focus more time and attention on your heifers at calving," Cook said.

The national average weaning weight (WW) is approximately 550 lbs. for steers and 525 lbs. for heifers. An age-adjusted WW will allow for more meaningful comparisons between cows and calves. To find out how to calculate age-adjusted weaning weight, contact a Noble Foundation livestock specialist, your county Extension agent, or consult the Beef Improvement Federation. Once the adjusted WW is calculated, ratio the data to get a feel for which cows are producing calves with unacceptable WW.

Weaning is the most common time to palpate cows for pregnancy. The national average for pregnancy percentage is 92 percent. However, the NAHMS data reports that only 35 percent of producers have their cows palpated.

"This is a shocking statistic, since determining which cows are open allows producers to effectively cull open cows or at least to manage the two groups separately until open cows can be marketed or exposed to the bull for breeding," Cook said.

The old standby calculation of most probable producing ability (MPPA) is defined by the Beef Improvement Federation as an estimate of a cow's future superiority or inferiority for a repeatable trait (such as progeny weaning weight) based upon the cow's past production in comparison to her contemporaries, her past records, and the repeatability of the trait in question. MPPA is simply an indication of the within-herd rank of the cow's ability to wean calves with high weaning ratios, taking into account the number of calves produced. MPPA can be an effective tool for culling cows that don't produce at an acceptable level, and can be figured like this:

MPPA = [100 + N x 0.4 x (C - 100)]/1 + [(N - 1) x 0.4]
N = Number of calves included in the cow's average; C = Average weaning weight ratio for all calves the cow has produced; 0.4 = Repeatability for weaning weight ratio

"Remember that MPPA is used most effectively within your own production system with cows that are managed similarly," Cook said.

In addition to individual cow performance, consider measures of cowherd performance such as pounds of calf weaned/cow exposed (the national average is 475 lbs.), calving percentage (90 percent), weaning percentage (87 percent), and replacement rate (20 percent).

"Now, I realize this sounds like a lot of information to keep track of and calculate, but in reality, very little record keeping is needed. It all can be kept in the Integrated Resource Management red book [small book for recording simple herd information] and compiled once a year," Cook said.

So this year when someone asks how your calves did, you may want to have the whole game summary, not just information from a single offensive series, he added.

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The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, headquartered in Ardmore, Okla., is a non-profit organization conducting agricultural, forage biotechnological, and plant biology research; providing grants to numerous non-profit charitable, educational and health organizations; and assisting farmers and ranchers through educational and consultative agricultural programs.

To learn more, visit the Noble Foundation Web site at http://www.noble.org.

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