How Good Are Your Calves?
ELDON COLE
MT. VERNON, MO.
When you sell your feeders or weaned calves they probably will only be in the ring a minute or less. Prospective buyers sure don’t have much time to decide if your calves fit their orders. You can help by doing homework and feeding it to the personnel at the sale facility ahead of time.
The homework may consist of carcass and feedlot performance of herdmates with similar genetics and management. It could be as simple as results from steers you sent to our Missouri Steer Feedout in recent years. It could be a summary of the bulls’ EPD’s and genomic profiles you’ve used in recent years. More is better, so if you’ve sent your entire calf crop to a feedlot and had carcass results provided, that’s powerful data.
The information needs to be condensed, objective and made available to order buyers who likely will be at the market where you sell ahead of sale time. Breed associations can help if they have a special sale lined up. Don’t overlook any opportunity to “market” your genetic package, rather than “just selling” them.
Our next steer feedout signup deadline is May 10. Those steers should be weaned and vaccinated 45 days prior to our June 6 pickup date at Joplin Regional Stockyards. Those steers must have been born after July 1, 2016 and weigh at least 500 pounds at pickup., You must have 5 head or more. Actually, depending on your herd size, you should send 10, 15 or 20 head to secure a representative sampling. The numbers will help.
There are details of the process at http://extension.missouri.edu/lawrence/livestock.aspx or contact me or your nearest extension livestock specialist. The steers will be fed in southwest Iowa as part of the Tri-County Steer Carcass Futurity. If you’ve never received post-weaning information on your cattle I guarantee the feedout will open your eyes and hopefully assist you in marketing your future calf crops. ∆
ELDON COLE: Extension Livestock Specialist, University of Missouri