Early Weaning: Benefits and Drawbacks
Drought strategy to save cows benefits calves.
With drought in several regions this year, some producers are thinking about early weaning. As an industry, we are gaining more knowledge about this option. John Maddux of Maddux Cattle Co., Wauneta, Neb., has done a lot of early weaning.
“We run 2,000 to 2,500 cows on native range and a lot of cornstalks the cows can winter on,” he says. “We generally don’t have to feed our cows; they graze year-round.”
About 15 years ago, this ranch was feeding/finishing all its calves.
“We had a small feedlot where we fed our calves plus purchased calves. When the drought began, we started taking those March-born calves into the feedlot earlier, looking at ways to keep our cow herd together and not have to sell down,” explains Maddux. “At that point in time, the real driver for early weaning was to get the calf off the cow.”
Many ranchers were trying early weaning to take lactation pressure off the cows to get through the rest of the year with less feed and to breed back.
“We took the calves off so we could feed those cows a concentrate ration, but limit-feed them,” Maddux says. “We were short on grass, and found that the hot ration was a successful maintenance ration.”
The cows were locked in a large pasture and fed under an electric wire. They would only eat for a few minutes each day, but it was a high-energy diet that gave them what they needed.
“Taking calves off the cows enabled us to limit-feed those cows. We could put $2 corn into those cows, with our purchased ration costing 50¢ per head per day,” he explains. With corn at that price, the ration was cheaper than the cost of grass.
Maddux weaned the calves on irrigated pasture and fed them distillers’ grains.
“They had plenty of good grass and corn byproducts,” he says. “The calves might weigh 300 pounds after a few weeks on this program, then we put them in the feedlot and start them on a hot ration. We fed them up to a 1,300-pound fat steer by the first of April the next year.”
The early-weaned calves responded well to the high-concentrate diet, he says. Starting that young, feed conversions were fantastic — more like a hog with a simple stomach — since the calves’ rumens were not developed very well yet. They were very efficient at digesting grain.
“This worked extremely well to get us through the drought without having to liquidate cow numbers,” Maddux says. “Early weaning was very successful, and we did it for about 10 years.”
When feedgrain costs increased, it was no longer cost-effective to limit-feed cows the hot ration. It also put pressure on adding more weight to the calves outside the feedlot, says Maddux. “We adjusted our model and started calving later, in May instead of March, and eliminated all feed for our cows — making them graze cornstalks in winter and grass in summer. We went from feeding calves to running a yearling operation.”
They began to wean the calves at 60-75 days old.
“One of the biggest benefits of weaning this young is that calf health is fantastic because they still have all their maternal antibodies from colostrum. They are still protected from disease,” says Maddux. “We didn’t vaccinate those calves until they were older because the maternal antibodies interfere with the immune response when they are young. From a health standpoint, early weaning is fantastic.”
Feed efficiency after that wasn’t as good, though.
“Whatever we might have been saving feed-wise by early weaning was somewhat offset by having to put more high-quality feed into them as a backgrounding ration rather than running them on pasture,” he says. “If you had a 500-pound calf you could just run him on pasture with a little supplement and he’d do well. Early weaning can work, but it needs to fit your production model and marketing plan in order to work.”
Editor’s Note: Heather Smith Thomas is a freelance writer and cattlewoman from Salmon, Idaho.