Without a good cowherd there can be no bulls. Every one of our purebred cows spends her lifetime, other than breeding season, running alongside our commercial cows. If they cannot maintain their condition and bring a good calf home every fall they are culled.
Our cows calve in May and June, on grass, with a minimum of supervision. Quite honestly we just don't have time to play nursemaid to every cow. They are rotated through pastures all summer and fall, then put on crop stubble and wasteland. When they run out of land to graze they are turned out on oat and barley swaths. The calves are weaned in December and we usually don't have to start feeding cows until sometime in January.
Our winter feeding program consists of mainly baled greenfeed and straw with chaff. We supplement the cows with barley and silage as needed but they are allowed to lose some condition or at best hold their own until the snow melts in early April. The cows then begin grazing carryover grass that was set aside last summer.
As the new growth starts to come on at the end of the month the cows begin to start calving. It is in this May and June time period, right through calving, that we expect our cows to gain weight, rapidly, and most of them do. The two most important things to us in a beef cow are fertility and fleshing ability.
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Saskvalley Stock Farm
The Lehmanns
Box 566
Rosthern, Saskatchewan, Canada
S0K 3R0
Wes (306) 232-4951
Carl (306) 232-5212
email:
cmlehmann@sasktel.net
Murray (306) 232-5337
Barry (306) 232-5052