Adding Value To Calves Before the Sale

By Patrick Cavanaugh

The California Beef Council Improvement Association met recently to discuss how to improve the quality of calves to attract buyers and to receive a higher price.

He’s talking about vaccinating cattle. It’s all about making your calves more desirable for a buyer, but the one thing that starts things in motion is the genetics.

Dave Thompson with Formoso Cattle Co.

“Of course genetics is so important, to get the right genetics so that you can have something to market,” said Dave Thompson a cattleman with the Formoso Cattle Company. It’s a cow, calf, and yearling operation with ranchers in Bakersfield, California and Chiloquin, Oregon. “As an example, there’s a customer that I buy calves from, and they bought some bred heifers that I don’t think were too desirable, but they thought they were all right, but nobody wants to buy those kind of cattle. It’s genetics that people want to buy.

Thompson also discussed the importance of vaccinations. “It’s the wall of immunity you try to build up and you have to use that vaccination program so that the cattle can handle the stress, because stress is breaking down that wall, so the wall is important to maintain the health of the animal.

And Thompson said he prefers live vaccines to killed vaccines.

He also noted that a good nutrition program must be in place to insure that the vaccinations will work,” he said.

And among the biggest stress situations that a calf can experience is the trip to the feedlot. “It’s tremendously stressful,” said Thompson. “It would be a good education if some producers could actually travel back to a feed yard and watch their cattle get off the truck. Or they could go back and look at them after the first, say five to ten days.

“The producers might be little appalled and maybe think their cattle weren’t being taken care of, but it really just has to do with the stress that that animal goes through from the long trip and then a whole different environment and maybe co-mingling with other animals that they’re not used to being with. That’s why it’s so important to build that wall up and get ready for that experience for the calf.”