Ranchers Hear Different Views
On Developing Replacements

By Colleen Schreiber

COLLEGE STATION — A comparison of management systems for raising quality replacement heifers in a typically high rainfall area versus an arid environment was one session topic at Texas A&M’s 44th Beef Cattle Short Course here in August.

Jim Theeck, with Rafter J Land and Cattle Company, Brenham, has been raising quality replacement heifers in Southeast Texas for the past 31 years. The first step in developing replacement females is to select bulls that can raise replacement heifers suited to the local environment, he told listeners. For Theeck and most in the southeastern U.S., that means a cow with some Brahman influence and a mature body weight of 1200 pounds.

"It makes no difference where you are, there are some cattle that excel maternally for your area," Theeck said. "When I start selecting sires to go on quality registered cows, I use sires with some Bos Indicus, be that Santa Gertrudis, Beefmaster, Brangus, Simbrah, etc.

"I know that I am giving up some on the steer end of the deal," he admitted. "If I wanted to sell the highest dollar calf today, the thing to do would be to use an Angus or Charolais bull on our cows. Those females, however, would not make excellent replacements where we are."

A replacement female, he said, has only two functions to be concerned with: she has to have a calf every 12 months, preferably starting at 24 months; and she has to give enough milk for that calf to reach its genetic potential.

Theeck noted that a certain amount of selection needs to be done phenotypically, by conformation.

"I have never seen a good brood cow that was tall as hell and shallow-bodied. Good brood cows are deep-ribbed, easy fleshing, good milking and are an optimum size. They need to produce at least 50 percent of their body weight in calves."

When breeding heifers to calve at 24 months of age, Theeck said, the most critical factor is for that heifer to be on track to reach optimum body condition score.

"She cannot miss one day of gaining weight. From the day she is weaned, she has to be going forward," he stressed.

Theeck took listeners through the process he uses for developing heifers.

First, calves are given standard vaccinations at 30 to 60 days of age. At five months of age, calves are dehorned and given appropriate booster shots. A couple of weeks prior to weaning, they go to wheat fields.

"We do this not because we want them to gain weight, but because we’re trying to teach them to eat, which in the end hopefully minimizes sickness and death loss at weaning."

The calves are weaned and held in pens for 30 days and fed eight pounds of feed a day with hay free choice. The medicated ration consists of 60 percent corn, 20 percent cottonseed hulls, 10 percent alfalfa meal and 10 percent cottonseed meal.

"Again, we’re not trying to put weight on them, but instead we’re trying to get them over weaning and get them started growing good," Theeck explains.

The heifer calves are given a brucellosis vaccination during this time. Medication is taken out of the feed three days prior to the brucellosis vaccination.

The heifers are then taken to a cutting horse operation and worked horseback for a two week period. This step, he explains, helps gentle them and makes them easier to handle.

They’re then brought back to the ranch, where they go immediately to hay meadows. Theeck’s scheduled calving season is such that the calves are weaned about the time of the second cutting on their hay fields, and the new growth in these Bermuda fields provides sufficient protein and allows the heifers to grow about a pound and a half a day without extra supplementation.

If they’re in a dry situation and the Bermuda grass is rank, heifers are supplemented with two pounds of ground corn and two pounds of ground cottonseed meal per head per day.

"The key is to keep the nutrition level up so that you can keep them growing," he reiterated. "You either make or break that heifer from weaning time until she has her first calf. You can take the best genetics in the world, and with limited or the wrong amount of nutrition you can turn her into a regular old auction barn replacement heifer."

When the Bermuda pastures play out, heifer calves are shifted over to winter pasture where they remain until they’re weighing 750 to 800 pounds, which Theeck considers to be the optimum weight range for breeding heifers.

"I laugh when people say heifer calves get too fat. I’ve never seen one that wouldn’t breed that got too fat on forage. I’ve seen a lot of them ruined by getting fat on feed."

Theeck said that in Southeast Texas it’s too costly to have heifers calve at anything other than 24 months of age.

"In this country, if you let a heifer go ‘til she’s three years old before she calves, she’ll be so big and fat and unhealthy that you may as well not have kept her to begin with."

Yearling heifers are bred to easy calving Red Angus bulls with frame scores averaging three to four.

Once bred, the heifers run through the summer in much the same way, on improved pasture, but with no supplementation other than mineral. If the grass loses its nutrition, the heifers are put on a liquid protein supplement until they calve.

On a 90-day breeding season, normal conception rates for these heifer calves average right at 96 percent with a 92 percent breed-back on their second calf.

This year, steer calves weaned at 220 days off these first-calf heifers averaged 627 pounds. Steers out of their three year-old heifers averaged 637 pounds.

Theeck told listeners he learned some things in 1996 which he knows not to repeat in the current drouth.

"That year the heifers were about 100 pounds lighter because I didn’t provide for the necessary extra supplementation. The conception rate on those heifers was 51 percent," he said. "That shows how critical it is to get her to the proper weight by the time she’s 15 or 16 months of age."

He also briefly discussed some of the overhead costs associated with improved pastures. Ryegrass, Theeck said, costs him about $39 an acre to plant and maintain, while oats cost $52 an acre, and depending on the number of times it’s top-dressed, it can possibly run as high as $80 an acre.

Initially, Theeck planted Gulf ryegrass, but a couple of years ago he switched to Tam 90. Last year he ran out of the Tam 90 variety before he finished planting, so he filled in five acres with the Gulf variety.

"It was about six inches taller and twice as thick as the rest of the stand, so I’m going away from $40 seed back to $28 seed," he told listeners.

He prefers to run his first calf heifers on rye and his weanlings on oats, primarily because the oats are ready to graze earlier, by the middle of November, and he says they gain better on the oats.

"We generally plant oats and then overseed with rye," he told the crowd. "By April 15 the oats are usually played out and the rye will carry on and give you some additional grazing through June."

The other advantage of ryegrass is that it’s hardier than oats.

Theeck has a special heifer replacement sale every year. The yearling heifers are sold exposed for 45 days and they guarantee their heifers to breed.

"We believe so strongly in our fertility that if they don’t breed we’ll take them back and give you your money back," Theeck said.

These F-1 Braford cows, he says, generally sell for three times the value of a calf.

"Part of the reason is that they have very high hybrid vigor, which results in very high weaning weights on the calves. It’s not uncommon for a good F-1 Braford cow to wean a 750 pound calf. Plus, that cow will last ‘til she’s 14 or 15 years old."

Spade Ranches have been operating in the Rolling Plains of Texas since 1889. Today the Spade enterprise encompasses five outfits in six Texas counties and two New Mexico counties. Precipitation on their respective ranches varies from a low of 12 inches annually to a high of 24 inches, while stocking rates range from one animal unit to 15 acres to one animal to 55 acres.

Renderbrook Spade, their largest unit, a 200 section, 4000-unit ranch located in Mitchell, Sterling and Coke counties, has an average rainfall of 19 inches. There cattle are stocked 30 to 35 acres to the animal unit.

Assistant manager Jim McAdams came from East Texas to West Texas when he joined the Spade outfit in 1992. He went from one environmental extreme to another, and the differences in management style, he told listeners, were just as extreme.

"I spent the first 20 years of my ranching career trying to develop the perfect female," McAdams said. "What I learned after coming to West Texas was that I had quite possibly been trying to catch the wrong animal all those years. I was looking for cows that would do more with more."

While on his family’s East Texas ranch at Madisonville, McAdams raised replacement females in much the same way that was described by Theeck.

"The only problem that I saw with that system was that it was costing a lot. The cows continually required more and more inputs, especially feed, and some would still fall out at four and five years of age," McAdams said.

At the Spades, McAdams learned that everything begins and ends with the range resource. Unlike in East Texas, harvested feed, which he called the "most inefficient resource in the cattle business," is the most minor of their resources.

"The grass in West Texas may be short, but it’s stout," McAdams contended. "It’s true what they say: a mouthful of grass in a low rainfall area is worth a bellyful of grass in a high rainfall area. When it’s good, it’s very, very good.

"You’ve got to be stocked right," he continued, "because country in arid environments is pretty unforgiving. We worry most about our feed resource, which is the rangeland, and hand in hand with that is our water resource. What’s driving us off of our country with this current drouth is not that we’re out of grass, its that we’re out of water."

Manager and CEO of Spade Ranches, Dr. William J. "Dub" Waldrip, has been breeding up the Spade cattle for the last 30 years. When he came on board in 1967, Herefords were the one and only breed on the Spade ranches. Waldrip realized early on that they needed more milk and more size in their cows, and he quickly put to work one of the cheapest tools available in the cattle business: heterosis.

The first cross incorporated was the Brown Swiss. Eventually a four-breed rotation was put in place. That rotation, using Hereford, Braunvieh, Angus and Simmental breeds, is still in place today.

The Spades’ motto has been moderation in all things. They’ve focused on producing low-input females that are adapted to their arid environment.

"We want a moderate frame size cow that when mature weighs about 1100 pounds," McAdams explained. "We don’t really care what she looks like. We don’t care what color she is. We just want her to be structurally correct with sound feet and legs. She needs to have a good bag, a good udder, and finally she needs to have a feminine appearance. After that, it’s most important that she be able to survive under a variety of conditions."

Spade places about 90 percent of their selection emphasis on fertility. Even though fertility is said to be a low heritability trait, Spade never keeps replacements out of late calving cows, and during a drouth, the cows that are late calvers are the first to be culled.

"We believe the earliest cull is the cheapest cull," McAdams told listeners.

Spade measures reproductive efficiency based on how many calves a cow weans in her lifetime.

"We want her to wean a calf every year, and we want her to live a long time having them."

Calves must be of acceptable body weight, but unlike East Texas operators, Spade doesn’t focus on milk production.

"Our management philosophy actually suppresses milk," McAdams noted. "That’s how we get by. We want that calf to have the potential to grow, but we want that calf to grow because it has the genetic ability to grow, not because its mother has the genetic ability to milk," he explained.

"If a calf is growing because of the cow’s ability to milk, he may not do very well in the feedlot. I’ve bought a lot of 750 pound calves out of East Texas that fed terrible. Their mothers milked a lot and the calves were just soggy, and when they got to the feedlot they didn’t convert very well. So we’ve always emphasized the calf’s ability to grow on its own and its ability to convert forage to beef."

Calves are weaned for 45 days in grass traps. The heifers that are kept for replacements are taken to rangeland and stocked at 20 acres to the unit. They’re "roughed" through the winter with very little supplementation.

"We don’t feed them any more than we would feed our cows during a rough winter, which amounts to about two pounds of protein per head per day," he explains.

Ideally, McAdams wants the heifers to gain about three quarters of a pound a day.

"We don’t feed them to a certain condition score, but we spend a lot of time making sure we’re stocked properly," McAdams explained. "If they’re not doing good, we adjust our stocking rate. We don’t adjust supplementation."

Feeding to a certain body condition score, McAdams believes, propagates inefficiencies.

"We want to find those heifers that can breed in a low condition score or ones that can stay in optimum condition score given the environment and resources available," he reiterated. "We’re sure not going to feed that low end to get them to the high end."

Calving ease Jersey bulls are used on their first-calf heifers, and they’re joined 10 days to two weeks before the cows.

"We expect our heifers to calve unassisted but also unattended," McAdams told listeners.

Bulls are with the heifers for 65 days. Forty-five days after the bulls are removed, the heifers are palpated and the open ones are either sold or they go to the feedlot.

The bred heifers are run separately from the cow herd, but they’re not pampered. Breed-up on the heifers varies from year to year depending on the environmental conditions and the breed. It’s been as poor as 65 percent and as high as 95 percent, McAdams said, but generally 85 percent is an average figure year in and year out.

The 9/16 Hereford cows, which are run at their driest ranch at Elida, New Mexico, are the first cows in their breed rotation to fall out.

"They’re real easy to get bred as yearlings and twos. They’re fertile. That’s why people love them," McAdams said. "When they get stressed, though, they quit milking, but they’ll keep breeding. These cows generally fall out because of bad bags and bad eyes."

The second cow that falls out is the 9/16 Braunvieh, and the reason, McAdams said, is because they still haven’t been able to suppress milk enough to get them to breed under their conditions.

To counter that, about six years ago, the Spade began raising their own registered Braunvieh herd. This allowed them to select replacements and establish a herd with genetics suited to their specific environment. McAdams said he already sees an improvement in reproduction efficiency.

The 9/16 Angus cows, he told listeners, are good middle of the road cows. Their biggest problem, he said, is that their teeth seem to be wearing out.

The 9/16 Simmental cow with a 9/16 Hereford calf is Spade’s best cow.

"Anyone who knows anything about the Simmental breed knows that they milk too much, but the Spade has been raising their own Simmental cows and their own Hereford cows from the very beginning, and they never did chase the trends like milk and frame size to the extreme," McAdams pointed out. "We’ve always applied the same selection pressures over the years, and we’ve kept these cows moderate and milk production in the range that the environment could support.

"These cows have longevity," he continued, "and they’re still producing at 14 years of age. I don’t think it has so much to do with the breed as the selection within the breed."

Over the last five years the steer calves on the Spades have averaged within five pounds of 685 pounds at weaning. The heifers are 30 to 35 pounds lighter.

The offspring are also managed in the feedlot in such a way that they’re fed and marketed to the most efficient and profitable end point. The Hereford cross calves, for example, are finished at about 150 days and are sold to those who specifically want Select carcasses.

"If you feed them much over 150 days, their performance goes down the tank," McAdams said. "They work the best when grain is high, because they require the least amount of grain of any of our breeds to get to their optimum finish."

The 9/16 Braunviehs are a good carcass breed and thus are managed just the opposite of the Hereford calves.

"These Braunvieh calves will grade as good or better than Angus from a quality standpoint, because they will marble but they won’t put on backfat. That’s one of the reasons that they winter so poorly," he noted. "When corn is cheap, they’re the best breed we have. We can feed them for 200 days and get them to 85 percent Choice, YG 2’s."

The Simmentals, he said, need to be fed about as long as the Braunviehs, but they grade like the Herefords. The Angus calves fall right in the middle and are generally fed for about 165 days.

To conclude, McAdams summed up their selection process in this way: moderation in all things; don’t single-trait select; and always remember, "we’re ranching to make money. Your bottom line should be the driver, not what looks pretty or is pleasing to you; and finally, don’t try to have cows that do more with more, but instead have cows that do the same with less. Once you achieve that, you can ask them to do more."