The ongoing drought widely affecting the U.S. Plains and western half of the country has drastically limited feed and forage supplies, subsequently increasing input costs and forcing many producers to liquidate some, or all of their cattle.
According to a report by Lance Zimmerman, Rabo AgriFinance senior beef analyst, “meaningful progress in rebuilding the nation’s cow herd will not come until 2025 at the earliest,” meaning many of the initially needed replacement heifers are hitting the ground this spring.
Zimmerman’s report goes on to say “cow-calf producers will be tasked with building a more economically viable herd as outside demands on production agriculture intensify,” which should have some producers questioning their decision to raise or purchase the replacements necessary in the rebuilding process.
There are advantages to both buying and developing replacement heifers. Purchasing outside females allows a producer to continue adding maternal characteristics while using high-quality terminal sires in their herd. On the other hand, developing replacement heifers gives a producer more control over the genetics in the herd and allows them to retain females that best fit their environment.
The decision whether or not to raise replacements comes down to available management resources to properly select, wean, develop and calve replacement heifers and, of course, the economics—winter feed costs, opportunity cost of the heifer and breeding costs. Raising replacement heifers is widely acknowledged as one of the costliest activities, yet one of the most important investment activities for a cow-calf producer.
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A good decision-making starting point is herd size. According to research from Jim McGrann, professor emeritus in the department of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University (TAMU), if a producer owns fewer than 200 cows, purchasing bred heifers is usually a better economic alternative. To help producers understand the risks and opportunities associated with developing heifers in their own operations, TAMU has developed a replacement heifer budget that calculates total production costs and return on investment to evaluate production, breeding systems and pricing and marketing alternatives.
In his role as an Extension beef reproduction specialist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), Rick Funston, Ph.D., has extensively researched strategies to cost effectively develop replacement heifers. He said producers interested in raising their own replacements should consider employing a systems approach that utilizes feed resources heifers will be expected to consume as mature cows.
He added that increased feed costs have negatively impacted heifer development protocols that rely heavily on harvested feeds.
A 2018 multi-university study “Profitability of Developing Beef Heifers on Stockpiled Winter Forages” compared developing heifers on a low-input, forage-based system to a high-input, drylot system and the impact on profitability of the system over an 11-year lifespan.
When heifer replacement rate and cow costs were held constant across the heifer development systems and the breakeven period to pay off heifer development costs was estimated in years of age, heifers developed on a low-input, forage-based system became profitable at 3 to 4 years of age, whereas heifers developed in a drylot were 9 to 10 years of age before their investment cost was covered.
“Lower-input systems allow producers to develop replacement heifers at lower cost without sacrificing reproductive performance,” Funston said.
Furthermore, while traditional recommendations suggest heifers should be managed to reach 65% of their mature body weight at breeding to maximize pregnancy rate, Funston’s research and studies from other universities have shown that heifers can be developed to just 50-57% of their mature weight at breeding without impairing reproductive performance.
“Developing replacement heifers to lower target weights—but still on a positive plane of nutrition prior to the breeding season and through calving—can still yield acceptable pregnancy rates and longevity,” he explained.
Once the decision to raise replacement heifers has been made, Funston said record-keeping becomes critical to proper selection. For example, research indicates heifers born in the first 21 days of the calving season have a higher pregnancy rate, breed back earlier and wean a heavier calf, yet they are often culled because they tend to be larger than some of their contemporaries.
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“I think we should be cautious in culling larger heifers that are born early and out of a moderate cow,” he said. “Many producers will say they cull the big end and the lighter end and keep those that fall in the middle, but if those heifers are bigger just because they’re older, I think that’s a mistake.”
Additional research shows that if a heifer initially conceives in her first cycle, she has greater longevity in the herd, and by the time she weans her sixth calf, she will have weaned the equivalent of another calf because of age effect on weaning weight. Funston also said that contrary to common industry practice, there’s not adequate data indicating culling heifers out of older cows is necessary.
“Longevity is a hard thing to measure, but those older cows have shown you that they can exist in your environment,” he said. “We call reproduction lowly heritable because we’re measuring one event one time of year, but if we put it all together with the number of calves a cow has and when she’s calved each year, we probably directly select better for longevity.”
Funston pointed to research by Jim Gosey, Ph.D., beef specialist and professor emeritus at UNL, which suggests the following criteria for removing heifers from the replacement pool:
• born late in the calving season (after the first 45 days).
• from cows that needed assistance at calving.
• born to dams that have big teats or need help getting their calves to nurse.
• exceptionally small at weaning.
• nervous or have an attitude problem.
Stocker Ranch
On the Stocker Ranch near Dillon, MT, manager Larry Hochhalter has increased the operation’s herd size from 110 to 220 commercial Red Angus cows over the past five years using a combination of retained replacements and purchased cows. He selects his 25-40 replacements based on phenotype and approximate calving date, and he leaves the heifers on the cows as long as possible before weaning. Replacements are fed through the winter and then artificially inseminated in late May to calve at the end of March.
As a mid-size ranch operator, Hochhalter has questioned the time, labor and expense of raising replacement heifers but said the decision to do so has ultimately come down to the quality of the females he’s been able to add back to the herd each year.
“We like our cows and we’ve paid special attention to the bulls we’ve purchased the past few years, so we like the genetics we’re getting,” he said.
“We realize there are a lot of nice females for sale every year—and we’re not afraid to purchase outside cows in times of expansion—but our own heifers are often much more suited to this environment, and we can be selective in deciding which ones we retain.”
Maddux Cattle Co.
At Maddux Cattle Co., headquartered in southwest Nebraska near Imperial, fourth-generation rancher John Maddux and his family run a large cow-calf and yearling operation featuring a unique five-breed composite cowherd—three-eighths Red Angus, one-quarter Tarentaise, one-eighth Red Poll, one-eighth South Devon and one-eighth Devon—to maximize hybrid vigor and maternal traits. They have used this “Maternalizer” composite to build a reputable business model marketing their smaller framed, easy-fleshing females to producers from Montana to Texas.
“When you have a maternal composite, the attractive product you have to sell is the females,” Maddux said. “We try to sell every cow before she’s 6 years old to minimize depreciation expense, so we have a very high replacement rate and end up breeding almost every heifer, whether to keep or to sell.”
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The operation is located on a combination of sandhills and irrigated farm ground, which gives them a “competitive advantage” as their nearly 2,300 cows graze native range in the summer, corn stalks in the winter and receive very little supplementation throughout the year. Heifer calves stay at their mother’s side through the winter, are weaned at 11 months and then developed on a fairly low-input, low-cost system, receiving only about 30 to 40 days of feed before going back to grass for the breeding season.
“I think it’s easy to put too many groceries into replacements. We have a very high conception rate in our heifers that are about 55% of mature weight when we breed them,” he said. “If you can run those heifers like you would a yearling, you don’t really have much more cost in your opens than you do over your breds.”
Maddux said in addition to low inputs, another key to profitability in the cattle business is high fertility, and he is a big believer in only keeping those heifers and cows that conceive early in the breeding season. He uses ultrasound to identify and retain the heifers that conceived in the first cycle, while heifers conceiving in the second cycle are sold.
“This allows us to improve fertility—not genetically, but statistically—because we don’t have those late-calving heifers and cows that don’t return to heat and don’t get bred the following year.
“Reproduction efficiency is extremely important to our bottom line, so it’s important for us to keep our own heifers so we have the luxury of being able to only save those that conceive early in the breeding season.” — Macey Mueller for the Red Angus Magazine
