Working Ranch April/May 2025

long and consume lower-quality nutrition, he added. “I realize things are different in Mississippi than they are in Montana,” Patterson said. “But the same lactation curve happens and the same change in nutrient require ments and forage removal happens in both places.” We need to understand the lac tation curve and how much power a producer has to control costs, he said. “Where are the leverage points? If I am going to intervene strategically with supplementation, when is that? What group of cows is that and how is that supplement plan built? I think those are really important questions.” UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES According to Scott, there are three unintended consequences with the trend toward heavier and heavi er-fed cattle harvest weights. “Number one, bigger cows can consume more feed than we realize,” Scott said. As cows get bigger, their maintenance requirement actually drops a little. “A cow that’s 50% bigger has a 36% lower maintenance require ment. But meeting her requirements doesn’t stop her from eating 1.5 times as much and we are not separating those bigger cows to feed them less than the rest of the herd.” This leads to unintended conse quence number two. “How many of us are running the same number of cows that grandpa did?” Scott asked. If so, Scott said a producer should have bought around one-and-a half times more acres to run cows on because they’re 50% bigger than grandpa’s cows 50 years ago. Unintended consequence number three, Scott said, is while cows are getting bigger, they are less efficient than smaller cows because they wean a lower percentage of their body weight, given that weaning weights have remained flat. Over a year, Scott estimated that a cow that’s 400 pounds heavier than another cow will consume about 1.5 tons more forage and that cows are 40% bigger than they were 30 years ago. “These larger cows consume more feed resources than we realize,” he said.

genetics. Today’s calves clearly have the genetics for growth, which is a good thing for those who own them after weaning. For cow-calf producers who sell at weaning, therein lies the mismatch between bigger cows and weaning weights. Bigger cows wean lighter calves as a percentage of the cow’s body weight. Unfortunately, those bigger cows eat more feed, mak ing them less efficient as cow body weights increase. ENTER NOW THE COST SIDE OF THIS DISCUSSION. Patterson used NRC information to model the differences between a “big” cow and one more “moderate” in weight and milk production and the resulting need for more forage. Patterson’s model showed a 960 pound increase in annual grazed forage intake for large cows com pared with moderate cows. “As you graze, (large cows are) going to need twice that because of trampling and leaving some residual,” Patterson said. “You’re looking at almost a ton of additional forage for that 1,450 pound higher milking cow versus a 1,300-pound cow with more moder ate milk production.” Regardless of cow weight, feed-re lated costs including pasture and fed alike revolve around the lactation curve, which is something cow-calf producers can control. Peak lacta tion, when a cow’s nutritional needs are the highest, happens when the calves are around two months old. However, larger cows with higher nutritional needs may fall below zero nutritionally earlier and more severely during the lactation period compared with smaller cows, Patterson told the audience. Since producers can turn on and turn off lactation by when they calve and when they wean, that’s where controlling feed costs becomes the focal point. Calving later in the spring or early summer means the cows are calving on green grass and are generally on a high plane of nutrition. Another management practice to keep cows on a better nutritional plane is to rotate pastures frequently. Cows stay on a higher plane of nutrition than if they graze the pasture too

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