Hi I’m Mike, record keeping on a ranch is essential, and today we take a look at ways
to keep track of your herd, no matter the size and why you should do it on our Wyoming
life.
Number 6 here is the oldest pregnant cow on the ranch, she is 12 years 7 months old.
Over her years she has had 11 calves, including one set of twins in 2013.
Her last calf was born on April 8th, 2017.
Her average calving interval is 362 days, and her post partum interval averages 77 days.
She has created $7476 worth of income for the ranch and in April of 2014, just 12 days
before she gave birth to a bull calf that weighed about 75 lbs, she twisted her ankle
and limped around for almost an entire month while it healed.
Oh and this year, she is due in early June, and probably is having another bull calf,
lets hope she watches where she steps this year.
Welcome back, and thanks for joining us once again as we continue to explore the ranch
life and escape the ordinary, if you would like to take the ride with us, take a minute
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On the ranch there is a ton of stuff worth keeping track of, from rainfall to oil changes,
to grazing records and water tests, but one of our biggest record keeping tasks has to
do with the cows.
When it all comes down to it, and you get past the romantic images of sunsets, snowfall,
and cowpokes moving their way across the plains, ranching is business and it has been since
the first cow was domesticated and the very first cow boy, or cow girl, figured out that
her time was worth something.
From that day forward, cattle records became a tool that cattle producers use to increase
the productivity, safety and the efficiency of their herds.
Unless you only have a few cows, its hard to remember who had twins last, or the date
the cows were exposed to the bull or even who had a sore leg or hoof and needs a special
eye kept on them for a few weeks, days or even years.
The first ranchers kept records on their walls, depicted as paintings, showing the best bull
to breed to and cows that gave the best milk.
Over the years that evolved as well, and cowboys moving herds of cattle across the great plains,
had to know how many they left the ranch with and how many they had left when they got to
Kansas city or summer pasture, but even then it was just about the herd and not so much
the individual cow.
In as early as 1895 ear tags were used in breed identification in the United States,
Canada began using them in the early 1900’s to identity cows tested for tuberculosis,
but it wasn’t until the 1950s and the advent of the two piece self-piercing ear tag that
we began tracking individual cattle more closely and I imagine it was then that cattle producers
started figuring out how important those records could be.
Gilbert, my father in law, was already a cattle producer at that time, and the great thing
about Gilbert was that in many ways he was stuck in the 1950’s at least technology
wise and up until the day he passed away he kept a majority of his cattle record keeping
on something a rancher always had with him, his checkbook.
Well the cover actually, it was on that piece of cardboard that Gilbert could tell you how
many calves he had on the ground so far, and how many cows were still waiting to give birth.
He would right down cows that needed medication and even cows that he didn’t like, that
he figured needed to go.
Also on that check book cover, was about 50 phone numbers Gilbert needed to remember,
and a good dose of tobacco juice, from the chew that he perpetually had in his gob.
When Gilbert passed away, I went through a lot of paperwork, and check book covers to
try to make sense of the herd he left us.
Then, having come from the corporate world, a dove into Microsoft excel and started making
sense of all of it.
I ended up with spreadsheets and what could only be described as a mess of numbers, dates
and eartags, and at some point, I took what I had, and used it to help me start over.
I started with the IRM redbook that actually put out by the NCBA, or the National Cattlemans
Beef Association.
While, I don’t agree with them on everything, I will say that we agree on record keeping
and if you need a simple way to keep track of what is going on with your herd, it’s
a great way to do it.
It’s a pocket sized book, with more than 100 pages, all designed to help you track
calving activity, pasture usage and all kinds of good stuff.
You can get it on the NCBA website, I think it costs about 7 bucks.
I used one for about a year, but each year you need a new book, and if you want to track
a cow over her entire life on the ranch, you can be digging through little red books until
all you see is red.
So I went back to my spreadsheets, took all the information from the little red books
and plugged it in.
Then I figured there had to be a better way and I started testing programs that helped
producers keep track of their herds.
I downloaded every app I could get my hands on and tried every one, but the one I settled
on was called Cattlemax.
At that time, I think it was 2014, they had a program that you downloaded and it lived
on your computer.
You still had to take a notebook or something with you to keep track of what was going on,
although you could print calving sheets that were handy along with inventory sheets to
keep track of your herd.
Then you had to come home, and enter all that in the computer.
Who calved that day, and any other information you wanted to track, preg checking, branding,
whatever you were up to, but things did get better.
I think it was in 2015 when cattlemax switched to entirely online system.
To be honest, I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever heard.
All of my cattle information was now online, there was no program on my computer anymore
and it just felt weird.
Over time, I’ve gotten used to it and now I use Cattlemax for all of our cattle record
keeping needs.
All of my information is in one place, accessible across any computer, tablet, or even phone.
I have everything I need to know about my entire herd, right at my finger tips and that’s
the way I like it.
Cattlemax has two programs, one for a commercial herd like ours and one for a registered herd
and the amount of information you can pull up at a moments notice is incredible.
Pricing is as low as 9 bucks a month and you can get a 21 day free trial at anytime, I’ll
put a link to their website down below and you can check it out for yourself.
I do wish they had an app, but maybe that’s coming someday, for now you have to log into
a website, which means you have to have internet to make changes or edit your information.
However you choose to keep records, I urge you to figure out a way to do it.
Over the long run, having certain information will help you manage your cattle, sheep, horses,
water buffalo or goat herd, better, safer and more efficiently.
There are certain things you want to make sure you keep track of and that starts with
inventory.
Know each of your cows by number, your breeding times, your calving times and your cost per
cow provides a benchmark to build everything else off of.
In addition, keep track of your pasture usage, document when you use a pasture each year,
how many cows are in there, for how long and even precipitation rates, that will give you
better stocking rate numbers that pertain directly to you and your pastures.
You can also use your cattle records to keep track of input costs, know how much each cow
is costing you, in feed, medical costs, depreciation and labor.
And then keep track of income, this includes bulls, steers, all your calves and your cows.
You can also use your records to keep track of feed costs, which can dictate how many
cows you can carry over the winter.
Here on our ranch, we have taken this year to reduce our herd size.
Feed costs are rising, we had hail that took out a good portion of hay crop and we had
aging cows.
After preg checking we decided to sell most all of our empty cattle, and we still had
to make sacrifices.
We figured out how much hay we have on hand to feed our cows over the winter.
Because we are expecting a hard winter, we figured in a buffer to help sustain them into
calving.
And we reduced our 150 cow herd size to exactly what we expect to be able to feed this winter.
113 pregnant cows.
Without, tracking, and keeping track of our herd, our grazing situation, our hay production,
calving rates, calving times and about 50 factors, we would have a lot harder time knowing
how to manage our business.
The hope is that this spring we can buy some bred heifers, build the herd back up, and
with new blood even and then add them, to our ever growing database of numbers, facts
and figures, that may seem to some, just the same way Gilberts checkbook cover seemed to
me, just a complete mess that I didn’t even want to touch, but now I know that the more
you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future, but it does you no
good, unless you can find that information about the past.
Thanks for joining me today, we are heading into the time on the ranch where things start
to settle down for a bit.
Cows get fed daily and we start to enjoy the calm before the storm and we can get a lot
done around the ranch and in the shop.
Again, please subscribe, find us on facebook and live the ranch life, through us, on our
Wyoming life.