Calving in May June

[cswilson]

Done it for years would never go back-my kids calve 200 plus cows while I'm gone custom a.i.ing-we selll all our production as finished beef on a quality grid so don't bother trying to 'guess the run'.

[Cedar]

One concern I would have with the summer calving would be that the cows would be out in the pasture cycling up a storm and the bulls can't go to work until...what?...about August. Anybody who summer calves have trouble keeping "the boys" where they're supposed to be until it's time?

[kato]

In our case, we've got good facilities that have evolved over a lot of years. None of them were expensive to build, because we did it ourselves, and shopped around. We've done things like building a handling facility out of mahogony boards from the floors of old boxcars. It's 30 years old and indestructable. We built our own sheds for a fraction of the 'custom built' ones. We converted an old dairy barn to a calving barn, and so on. We also converted old wooden granaries into self feeders for the steers that work like a charm. Your facilities don't have to be fancy commercially built in order to be functional.

Our take on it is that we have about half of our cows out on other people's pasture where they are charged on a by the pair rate. We want both halves of that pair to actually eat the grass! We also send them quite a ways away. We had 65 pairs in a pasture 50 miles away last summer, and you can't just check that one every day. They brought home some pretty big calves last fall too.

We can put those calves directly on feed, and have them finished and gone in the spring. Or sold as short keeps in February if the market dictates. Putting them back on grass the next summer is not an option. We'd rather use any grass we have for the cows. To move to a later calving, backgrounding on grass operation for us would be incredibly expensive, as we'd have to buy more land. We're short of land as it is.

It boils down to the best use of the land and resources you have is what will make the most money.