How Do I Choose My Cull Cows?

If you haven't already weaned your spring born calves yet, you probably will be soon. This also means that you will be looking at culling some cows as well, but how do you decide who goes and who stays?

This is where you management software really comes in handy. The first thing to do is get all your calves weaning weights entered into the software. Now it makes it easier to compare animals. This is also when knowing your cost of production (COP) is important. If you have already sold your calves, use the revenue number that they brought in. If not use the current average market price in your area, and estimate the revenue on your calves.

Once you know how much revenue each calf produced, or should produce, you can look to see if any cow produced a calf that brought less money than your COP. Any cow that produced an unprofitable calf should go on your cull list. The only exception to that is your first calf heifers. If they were close to generating a profit you may consider giving them another chance.

One other limitation to this process is reduced income from sorting. If your cow produced a nice big calf but is docked at market for something such as frozen ears or tails, something not related to the cow herself, I would keep her off the list.
Using the software I would also look at a treatment history. If there are any cows on the list with multiple treatments in the year I would recommend adding them to the cull list as well. If you are treating them multiple times they are a time drain on you as well as a profitability waster.

When you are choosing your cull cows it's also a good time to choose your replacement heifers. Using the same method for choosing cull cows, look at the cows that produced the largest calves this year. If you plan on keeping back 10 replacement heifers pull your 20 biggest ones. Then go into the pen and visually choose your 10 choices. By doing it this way you are combining economic and personal decisions. You still get to choose a nice looking heifer but one that has come from a profitable mom.

Once you have been tracking this data for a few years this method gets more accurate. You start building a calf history for each cow. You can start picking out those consistent profitable cows and start building a quality herd. Soon you might start finding it hard to find a bad cow in the herd. Since raising replacements has a cost, there may be an opportunity to reduce the number of replacement heifers required and save you some money.