Over 25 years ago, I moved to Nebraska as the general manager of the Rex Ranch. I had a lot of experience calving large groups of first-calf heifers, so until the ranch became bigger and had several units, it was only natural for me to work with one other person to calve, feed and care for the heifers and their calves.

Even though we were calving groups as large as 500 head, my co-worker did most of the feeding and cattle care. I helped with sorting heavies into the calving pasture, pairing out and periodic checking for calving problems. We split the night checking in the middle of the night so that we could overlap each other in the daytime for the few jobs that required two people

The first year, we didn’t have many heifers, so the calving difficulty didn’t seem so oppressive. However, the percentage of assisted births was far too high—though that was too long ago for me to remember the exact numbers. We were trying to grow rapidly so the next year we calved a lot of heifers. This time we didn’t have to check the numbers to recognize that we were pulling too many calves. 

I don’t remember if I helped calve for a third year, but about that time, we started having some senior veterinary students come to the ranch for obstetrical rotations during our heifer calving. I stayed close to the heifer calving for a number of years.

Because of the problems, we started to AI as many heifers as we could with one cycle of synchronized AI. We then followed up with cleanup bulls for about 45 days (I hadn’t yet gotten smart—remember 21-30 days is plenty). We used a bull well known for calving ease.

Many of the calves born before due date, and well over half were, came with no problem. However, calves continued to be born, from the same sire, for another 7-10 days. Guess what? The picture changed. Each successive day we pulled a higher percentage of the calves born that day. We used the same sire on enough large groups to be sure of the pattern.

With this much experience and information, we started to ask some questions:

I’d like to tell you that we found quick answers to each of these questions and fixed the problem quickly. We didn’t--it was slow. In my 18 years there, we reduced dystocia in heifers by more than 50%. I wanted it to be faster, but we were not using Wagyu or Corriente bulls to get easy calving. We wanted a level of performance, along with calving ease, using the breeds that were in our composite. My successors have cut dystocia in half again, and now pasture calve some heifers day and night without a night check.

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There are a few answers:

When I was younger, I would tell people I was calving or we would hear the question, “Are you calving?” For far too long, we did way too much of the calving.  I’m surely glad that I finally learned that we are not supposed to calve; the heifers are.

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