The Value of Pregnancy Checking

Value of Pregnancy Checking

Pregnancy checking cattle in the fall can add some big value to your operation. An obvious incentive is to identify open cows for sale, but the dividends go even further than that. For example, let’s say you take cows off of pasture on October 15^st, wean calves, and start feeding hay. If you are done calving by April 15 and sell open cows when they didn’t calve in the spring instead of at fall preg checking, you had fed an open cow for 183 days where she isn’t making you any money nursing a calf or being bred.

1400 lb cow x 2.5% DMI = 35 lbs hay per day

183 days x 35 lbs of hay per day = 6405 lbs = 3.2 tons of hay over 6 months 

$125/ton x 3.2 tons = $400 hay alone

This value doesn’t take into account supplementation and labor costs, or other factors such as risk of injury or cow death that comes with time. This also doesn’t take into account the lost opportunity cost of the calf you didn’t get out of this cow that you overwintered.

Knowing approximately when each cow will calve is another benefit of pregnancy checking. We can be most accurate with days of gestation before 90 days but can still give you close windows after that date. Having this information can be useful for many things such as sorting cows into calving groups and monitoring accordingly during their calving window.

This is a great opportunity to body condition score cattle as they come off of pasture and subsequently plan for winter nutrition needs. When we work your cows, you will get a report that shows pregnancy statuses and body condition scores of individual cows, and a graph compiling this information over entire group. This can be used to sort cows into groups to supplement differently or used to retrospectively assess stocking density of pastures identify potential cows to consider culling in the future due to difficulty maintaining condition.

When cattle are being pregnancy checked is a great time to vaccinating them, boostering immunity with annual vaccinations as well. A vaccine that includes common reproductive pathogens such as Leptospirosis can help prevent late term abortions and provide immunity over the coming year. Deworming at this time with an oral product is timely in the fall for those thin and young cows. A pour-on product for lice is also warranted before cold weather hits.

Pregnancy checking can seem like an added stressor for you in the already busy fall/harvest season, but as you can see, it can save you big dollars and time in the long run. We always look forward to helping you pregnancy check cows in the fall!