Are Your Cows Employees?

You furnish them health care, food and lodging and ask them to do a specific job—convert forages/feed into pounds of beef to sell—sounds like an employee to me.

If you look at your cows as employees, it will change your expectations of them.

Are Your Cows Employees?You have a lot invested in your cowherd, bulls, equipment and corrals, not counting the dollars invested in the land base to support your cowherd. That is a BIG DEAL! What do you expect your cows to do? Maybe they should pay the bills and make a profit!

Paying the bills is harder since the market has softened but if you want your employees/cows to be successful (pay the bills and make a profit,) they must have the tools necessary to do their job the best they can.

Tools like:

  • The right genetics to perform their task exceptionally.
  • Proper nutrition to do their job with minimal processed feed.
  • Proper herd health to perform at a high level.
  • Good management and marketing and a defined retirement/culling plan.

Genetics are the basic foundation of your herd.

Your herd’s performance is limited first by their genetic potential, then nutrition, health and management. Get the genetics right, add proper but not excessive nutrition and healthcare coupled with good management and marketing, and your employees will turn you into a winner.

There are only two ways to improve your genetics and thus your profitability—buy them and cull them. For the best results from your employees you must “hire” the right ones and “fire” the poor ones.

Before you write a check, make sure you are targeting the right genetics for your operation. What is the potential production of your operation? What size cow and what production level or weaning weight will your resources support without adding more feed expense? Extreme growth and milk production to raise bigger calves may be hiring the wrong type of employees if it costs more to support them than they can return in production. Remember, some genetics are worth more than others—such as fertility and calving ease. You must start with a live calf before any employee/cow can produce a profit. But then the cow and calf need the rest of the genetic package to be able to perform and produce the most valuable product to sell. That means traits like growth, milk and carcass all add value and must be balanced against each other to determine what is the best genetic package for your employees and your operation.

Buy Them

That’s where your seed stock provider can help. He knows his genetics; you know your needs. Together you can identify the right genetics—bulls—that fit your specific operation and cows/employees best.

Cull Them

Eliminating the cows/employees that are losing you money is the quickest way to add profits to your operation. You need to FIRE YOUR POOR EMPLOYEES/COWS! See the article on “Eliminating Losers” to see how easy this is.

Don’t Forget Heterosis!

If you could increase the production of your current cows/employees by 20% with no increase in costs/wages, would you do that? Let’s see, if my cows/employees currently produce $800 in revenue and they could produce $960 by incorporating heterosis—WHAT AM I WAITING FOR? See the article by Dr. Weber “Consider Crossbreeding for Improving Profitability and Sustainability…” in our recent newsletter for a complete explanation of how this works.

How important are your employees/cows to your operations profits? CRITICAL! 

Hiring the best employees/cows and bulls, managing them right, utilizing cost control measures like heterosis and marketing a superior product are key drivers to your success.

Flying H Genetics is ready to help. Our 70 years of experience getting the right genetics to our customers and offering several genetic breed packages means we can supply the exact genetics you need to get your job done.