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Hours Per Cow
ELDON COLE
MT. VERNON, MO.
Each year the University of Missouri Extension folks put together a publication of budgets for a variety of enterprises. I’ve been involved in providing some of the numbers for beef cattle in south Missouri. Fellow Extension specialist, Wesley Tucker at Bolivar also provides input.
It’s time to develop the 2019 budgets and a week ago Wesley and I were discussing the hours of labor required or actually spent per cow on a 50-cow operation each year in south Missouri. In recent years the number has been 5 hours. The number of hours is multiplied by the hourly wage rate which is $12.
Wesley felt the 5 hours per cow was too low. I said, I’d seen some budgets from western states with lower hours per cow. Of course the way they work with larger herds, less hay harvested and may not check cows as often as Missouri producers do, makes a difference.
During Mt. Vernon’s Apple Butter Makin’ Days while there was a break in ribeye steak selling, I visited with six or eight cow-calf raisers about how many hours they’d estimate they spend per cow per year. Their immediate response was, “I have no idea.” But after some thought they started doing some estimating. All of the ones I talked to had more than 100 cows with some having more than 400. They agreed time per cow should be lower than the 50-cow operation. However, they felt their actual time could be 10 hours or more. Hay harvest and feeding were the biggest labor demands which comes as no surprise.
When I started in Extension one project I worked with was the “beef panel” of 6 or 8 farmers in Saline county. All of those farmers also did significant row-cropping. They were asked to keep records of time spent with their beef cow herds. There were quite a few other counties around mid-Missouri that contributed data like I did.
A lot of technology has come down the pike, which you’d think should reduce labor for beef herds. Maybe all this topic does is create coffee shop, feed store or sale barn chatter. Let me or Wesley know if you have a better estimate than we use on our Missouri budgets. ∆
ELDON COLE: Extension Livestock Specialist, University of Missouri
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