Calving Season

This was actually written on the 20th, but I haven't had wireless access since then:

It’s calving season in Montague County!! Not that every cow read the manual and got bred within exactly the same 42 day window or will calve in 6 weeks time, but we are definitely in full swing. And Cross Timbers Vet Hospital is smack-dab stuck in the middle of it. In the past week, I have personally pulled 4.5 calves, fixed 3 prolapses, and removed one retained placenta. I’m not sure what the other two have been doing, but I’m pretty sure I end up more bruised and smelly than they do most days. Yep, that’s my excuse for my recent blogging hiatus and I’m sticking to it!


From an economic standpoint, having a set calving season is very beneficial to a beef cattle operation for many reasons. First, you know when your calves will hit the ground so you can be ready and waiting in case a cow needs help. Second, because your calves are all about the same age, you can “work” them, wean them, market them, and sell them at the same time. You can manage your cows nutrition level and vaccination and deworming schedules depending on their stage of gestation. And you don’t have to have a bull on your property year round.

On a dairy, it’s a different story: calving season is 365 days a year. Obviously, cows need to have calves to make milk. But it’s not healthy for a cow to give milk all the time. On average, a cow is milked 305 days and then given 60 days “dry-off” during the last trimester of pregnancy. If calves weren’t continually being born, we wouldn’t have a fresh supply of milk year round. Ideally, we would have an equal number of calves being born as we were weaning. That way we could make sure we have enough calf hutches and calving pens available. That’s not exactly been the case lately. Right now, we have about 35 bottle calves that have to be fed twice a day and we have about 180 cows “in milk”. So things have been busy both at work and at home.

In other news, things at the dairy are looking up a little bit. We’ve hired a new milk hand, Mario. Following training, he’ll be doing the morning milking 6 days a week (Read: no more early mornings for Scott!!) and will probably help out with other odds and ends from time to time. Keep your fingers crossed!! More about the dairy to follow…