Is it best to leave bulls with cows all year ?

I very seldom have any problem with summer calves so I leave the bulls with cows all year. Is this a good practice?

I bet the bulls are happy about it.

I always do but I only have one bull at a time two or more may cause some fighting between them.
Walt

No. How are you going to have a uniform calf crop to market, do you like vaccinating cows and calves at different times? To me it makes the most sense to hate a define calving season preferabley no more than 60 days. We calve 300 cows in the spring ( April/May) in 45 days and an additional 100 cows in the same time in the fall ( September/October)

If you ask 50 people you will get 50 different reasons for their answers. Do what works best for YOU!

Our bull has been out for 3 years straight but that is going to change next year, im sick of having calves all year. Like said its not fun vaccinating a few here and there and having an un-uniform calve crop

I sure agree.You may change calving times each year but the bull demeanor is much nicer. They are a much happier (less dangerous) animal if left with their lady friends all year.

I have always run the Bulls with the Cows year round, as long as there is not more than 20 Cows per Bull there is no worries about strung out calf crops, they will breed back the same as the other way.

I just have 3 angus cows, due to a small 10 ac, hobby farm. I time mine so they calve in march and april, and catch the spring rains, on my grass, and new growth by the time the calves start grazing. they go out as feeders, in sept, and I have 3 less mouths eating winter hay. Rent my bull each yr, so I dont have him grazing very long.

(quoted from post at 22:34:33 09/25/12) I have always run the Bulls with the Cows year round, as long as there is not more than 20 Cows per Bull there is no worries about strung out calf crops, they will breed back the same as the other way.

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rue!

I agree to this. I leave mine with the cows as I don't want him tearing the fences down when he is on one side, gets a whif of them in heet, and can't get to them on the other side to do something about it. Additionally, buzzards are a severe problem here and love to attack cows down berthing or just born/young calves. He helps to even the score and keep them away.

On the buzzards, I had a pair penned up once and counted 21 buzzards on the corral fences and down in the pen with them. The turkeys watch and the black, actually gray head and neck, white tipped stubby wings, go in for the kill. Bad news. Of course they are federally protected. What isn't? Permit? Texas PWD won't even answer their phone on the subject.

Mark

Keeping the bull from breeding too soon is one of the reasons I have some fall calving cows. I can then move him around so that I can time my calving time. I calve the spring group in Apr.-May. So I don"t want the bull back with them until Aug. or Sept. I want the fall group to be breed in Dec.-Jan. to calve in Aug.-Sept.

So I put the bull in with the Fall group in Dec. and he stays there until Late July or Aug. Then he goes in with the spring group until Dec.

This way the bull does not breed the easier breeding cows too soon but still has time to get his job done.

I have done it this way for many years. It makes the calving season go much easier. You don"t have to watch all of the time for calves. Also by having the two groups I can keep heifers away from the bull too. I can rotate them opposite the bull. This way I don"t have to have separate pastures for them.

The down side is you have to have two separate pastures for this to work. I have a rented farm that has a smaller pasture that the fall calving cattle stay on. It works well because it is a few miles away. So the bull does not jump back in where he should not be.

If you don"t have the pasture or the numbers to do it this way you can just pen the bull for a few months until your cows get in step better. Let the most of them calve before you let the bull back in with them. If you do this for several years you can get them in shorter breeding/calving window.

That will make your life much easier. Less labor watching the cows and you can treat the calves and them in larger groups. Setting up to treat two calves is not much shorter than doing twenty.

lemmond,
If you were a bull, wouldn't you want to be with the girls?

Grew up on a dairy farm, milked 60-70 cows. We had a happy bull. He was on the job 24/7.

I don't think you could build a fence strong enough to keep the bull from doing what he does best.
George

Depends on local weather and your marketing style.

I have some spring and fall calve'n cows. I keep the bull put up 8 months a year, have calves in April/May and October/November. I don't like have'n calves in July and August when pastures are short and flys can be bad. I don't like have'n calves on muddy ground in Feb in a 34 degree rain. I direct market most of my calves in two groups a year. This gives me a group of 18 month old freezer calves in the late spring and fall.

Buddy of mine direct markets too but he takes off a group the first week of every month. He calves year round so that he has a trailer load of finished calves ready to come off feed every month.

Most folks around here have all their calves in a 6 to 8 week window every year, makes for one working/weaning a year and one big group to sell at one time.

In short, just like most every other question when it comes to cow the answer is "it depends."

Good luck.

Dave

I leave the bull with our cows year round. I have noticed the birth cycle time has changed over the years. Most of my calves are born during the winter now.

I leave him in the herd because of laziness on my part. My calves are strung out with only 2-3 ready to go to market at one time. Not to mention having to work new calves all the time. You really are time and money ahead by separating them.

As a person who has done both, IT simply depends..IF you keep a bull up,and trust me this is NOT as easy as simply putting him in another pasture. you would be as well off or better off to go with artificial insemination these days. before folks start in on me let me explain why. first and for most, penning ANY animal not only changes their life but yours.your tied down to feeding and supplying that animals needs every day. before you put your bull up,think about if you simply have the lifestyle that allows this,most folks these days do not. Second, keeping one penned means you have to have the knowledge and the facilities to handle one. trust me even a gentle bull can be a real danger if he smells a cow in heat. next can your bull handle all your cows when you want? lots of guys who do this wind up with three or four bulls. fourth ,keeping your bull up doesnt mean in any way your cows wont get bred. in fact it often increases the chances that they will get bred by a neighbors bull giving you crosses you dont want. Of course if all these things fit into your operation ,its not all bad. for me personally its far and away easier to simply carry a bander,tagger ,and whatever stuff i want with me. catch that calf when hes a day old or two old and do it right there and then.IF you cant do this,or have time to do this, you probably dont have time to keep a bull up properly. but thats my opinion.

by knowing your cows,and keeping good records,you would be surprised at how short you can make calving season. most cows if you leave them out will naturaly calve in fall or spring. watch your cows and pick the ones that calve when you want. youll get some surprise ones but those at most cost you another trip to market. still cheaper than feeding bulls in pens all year round in my opinion.

It takes roughly 11 months for a full breeding cycle from breeding to calving to being ready to re-breed. So if you leave the bull with the cows you are going to have calves earlier and earlier each year. This year is a correction year for my herd. As in I got rid of the bull this year and will buy another in the june timeframe and keep him with the cows for 2-3 years till the cows get to having calves too early in the spring then its time to get rid of him and get a new bull.

Works for me.

The bull is happier running with the herd all the time! It also makes for a much quieter farm. But that has some disadvantages. When I was growing up we usually had a bull, usually a young Hereford that we generally kept about 2 years. After the bull had been with us for about 2 years, we would sell or butcher it to prevent the bull from breeding his daughters. We would then replace it with another young bull, usually the best one my Dad could come up with at the stockyards.

We usually would pen up the bull for several months a year, to try to schedule our calf crop for lat March or April. We had a bull pen that was strong enough that none of the bulls ever were able to break out. But all of them tried. Obviously the bull was not happy when they were penned up--they bellowed a lot and let everyone know they wanted out. A couple of times we tried penning the bull up with a steer for company, but it didn"t seem to help much, and I think the steer got bullied pretty badly. Luckily Hereford bulls are relatively benign, but I was always told to NEVER get into the bullpen when a bull was contained there.

Of course we had to feed the bull hay and keep the water tank filled in the bullpen. We also had a shelter where the bull could go to get out of the sun or weather, and lay down on relatively dry ground. Confining the bull also meant that the bullpen would need to be cleaned out after he was released.

We sometimes used the bullpen for confining heifers and cows we didn"t want bred while the bull was loose with the herd, and also it was connected to our loading chute, which we used when we hauled cattle to the stockyards or when we bought feeders. The bullpen was handy for getting newly acquired animals used to the idea that our place was their new home.

We sometimes used A.I. with our dairy cows, which were very used to being handled. A.I. usually worked quite well, and often the cows settled immediately. But for reasons I never really understood, sometimes a cow would not become bred and A.I. man would need to try again. Unfortunately that made the calf a month later and the cow"s lactation that much longer. Very seldom did we have any problems at all with the cows settling when bred by the bull. It just seemed to work better.

The way we managed our herd, having a bull made pretty good sense. Our bull usually serviced about 30 cows a year and helped produce a great calf crop. And after the bull had served his purpose at our place, we never had any trouble selling them to be used as a bull or to butcher. It always seemed to me that bulls grew faster than cows or steers, and I liked the taste of relatively young bull meat.

For a lot smaller herd, I would question keeping a bull, especially a bull that is not as benign as our Herefords were. Although using A.I. requires a lot more observation of the cows to catch them in the right stage of heat, I think that I would probably try that. Having a bull CAN be a lot of problems, requiring stouter fences, especially if the bull gets it into his head that he wants to roam around. Such a bull can be a real hassle. Good luck!