One of the most important things after trucking pairs to pasture is to make sure they “mother up” after unloading. If they don’t, young calves can be in trouble.
If you let them, the cows might be so interested in new grass after they get off the truck that they ignore their calves until they’ve taken care of themselves. If their calves can’t find them, they may leave the area looking for mama.
Ranchers who haul large numbers to summer pasture usually have a big holding area to mother up pairs. “If they haul four or five semi loads of cattle and dump them in one corral all at once it can be hard for pairs to find each other amongst 150 cows all mixed together, bawling and tight,” says Keith Elkington, a rancher near Idaho Falls, ID.
“They need room to move around to find each other. It helps to have a two- or three-acre area that’s well fenced, next to the corral, where you can kick them out and leave them to mother up. If they suckle their mother after you unload, and later can’t find their mother after you turn them out, they’ll go back there to find her and so will the cow.”
Bill Davis of Rollin’ Rock Angus, Belgrade, MT, recommends unloading in a small enough area the pairs can’t go far, but big enough to let them move around and find each other.
“Give them some time. Put them in the holding area and then go have a beer! After they’ve had a chance to mother up, we turn them out in a small pasture rather than a great big area. If you have to let them out in a big area, make sure they are pairs as you let them out—with the cow and her calf going out together. This can take a little time, but it saves time later,” he explains. There won’t be some cows or calves that try to go back home.”
Elkington also said unloading into small pastures and corrals are helpful for another reason.
“We have a corral in most pastures that’s big enough to hold [35] pairs with room to move around and find their calves. We unload in that corral—which is inside the pasture they’ll be in and leave them long enough to mother up. When they leave the corral, the calf will come back to where it saw mama last. If the cow goes out and fills up with grass and the calf can’t find her, it will go back to that corral where they mothered up after the haul, because it knows mama was there. The cow will eventually come back there, too,” says Elkington.
In some pastures the corrals are permanent and in other places use portable corrals. “After branding, we take the pairs to seven different pastures. In pastures with no corrals we have our cowboys make sure pairs get mothered up when they get there. It’s worthwhile to have the whole crew there to ride herd on them, and make sure they get settled in,” Davis says.
Tagging the calf with the same number as the cow can help too, just in case cow and calf can’t match themselves up.
“It doesn’t matter if it takes two hours; our cowboys stay until they are mothered up,” Elkington says.
“If they see a cow that hasn’t been sucked, they find her calf and take it to her. We generally have a lot of people helping, and sometimes a calf gets hauled to the wrong pasture. If they can’t find the mother for that calf, they’re supposed to bring that calf home with them—and then we go find her and bring her home, too.” — Heather Smith Thomas, WLJ correspondent
