Weaning Season and the Hay Count: How We Set Up for Winter

Every fall the whole operation turns on two questions: are the calves ready to come off their mommas, and do we have enough hay stacked to get the cow herd to green grass. Everything else is noise until those two are answered.

Labor Day is the turn. Up here in Gallatin, Missouri — Daviess County, about seventy miles north of Kansas City — the grass has quit growing like it did in June. The days are still warm but the nights are cooling off. That's the signal. From here to Thanksgiving is the busiest stretch of the year on the cattle side, and it's the stretch that decides what kind of winter we have.

So this week I want to walk you through what we're actually doing out here right now. Not the highlight reel. The work.

Weaning Season: Why We Don't Just Load Them on a Trailer

Weaning is the single most stressful thing that happens to a calf in its life. You take away its mother, its milk, and its whole social world in one afternoon. Do it wrong and that calf walks the fence for three days, doesn't eat, doesn't drink, and gets sick. Do it right and it barely misses a step.

The lazy way is what's called abrupt weaning — separate them completely, haul the calves somewhere out of earshot, and let them cry it out. It works. It's fast. It's also hard on the animal, and it costs you.

The research on this isn't subtle. South Dakota State University found that fenceline-weaned calves held their weight through the first seven days after separation, while abruptly weaned calves lost about 2.4 pounds a day. Work out of Utah found fenceline calves bawled less and spent more time eating. Michigan research found lower stress markers in the blood at day five. And University of Missouri, citing work out of California, reports fenceline calves gained 95% more weight in the first two weeks — and held that edge out to ten weeks.

How We Wean Calves on McBee Farm

"You can wean a calf in an afternoon or you can wean it in a week. The week costs you more labor and less medicine. I'll take that trade every time."

Weaning Isn't Just About the Calf

Here's the part people miss. Weaning is as much a cow decision as a calf decision.

A cow nursing a big calf in September is burning through everything she eats just to make milk. Pull that calf off and her nutrient requirements drop to the lowest point of the entire year for about 45 to 60 days. That's the cheapest window you will ever get to put condition back on her — on fall grass, before you're feeding hay.

And condition matters, because a cow that calves thin is a cow that breeds back late or doesn't breed back at all. University of Missouri Extension puts the target at a body condition score of 6 right before calving on the 1-to-9 scale, and about a score higher than that for first-calf heifers, since a young cow is still growing herself while she's growing a calf.

Adding that condition in October on grass is cheap. Trying to add it in January on hay is expensive and mostly doesn't work. Same cow. Same score. Completely different bill.

The Hay Count

Which brings us to the other half of fall: counting bales.

The math is not complicated, and every cattleman ought to run it before the first frost instead of after. University of Missouri Extension figures a cow eats about 3% of her body weight in dry matter every day. Run that out and a thousand-pound cow is around 35 pounds of hay as-fed; a thirteen-hundred-pound cow is closer to 45. Most commercial cows land somewhere in that band.

Then — and this is the part people skip — you add waste on top of that number, not inside it. Missouri assumes something like 20% in a real-world budget. Feed a cow 40 pounds and put out 48.

The rule of thumb that's easiest to carry in your head is one large round bale per cow per month of feeding. That's rancher arithmetic, not an extension publication, and bale weights vary enough that you ought to weigh a few of yours. But it'll get you close enough to know tonight whether you're short. And if you are short, you want to find that out now, while hay is available and reasonable — not in February when everybody's short and the price has doubled.

Where We Landed This Year

A couple of calls we made for this winter, and the reasoning behind them:

One Thing Missouri Has Going For It

It's been a good grass year here, and I don't say that lightly. As of the middle of August, USDA had 80% of Missouri pasture rated good to excellent, and the state's own market manager called Missouri's pasture conditions probably the best of any cow/calf state in the country.

Hay supplies are ample and prices have held steady — the Missouri Department of Agriculture had fair-to-good grass hay running roughly $75 to $100 a ton. That's the kind of year you don't waste. When the grass and the hay both cooperate, you put condition on cows and you buy the hay you need instead of gambling on spring.

We've had years that went the other way. You remember those a lot longer.

What's Next

Calves come off over the next few weeks. Preg-check comes after that, and that's the honest report card on the whole year — the cows that bred back stay, the ones that didn't go down the road. Then it's hay hauling, winter pasture rotation, and getting everything sitting where we want it before the first real cold snap.

And on a personal note — we're less than two weeks out from Dad being home, and this family cannot wait.

Fall's the season that tells you the truth about how you managed the last twelve months. So far, it's telling us we did all right.

— Steven McBee, McBee Farm & Cattle Co.