Small Scale Cattle Farming 101 | When is Calving Season? Here's what matters most!

Good afternoon, guys. Welcome back to another gorgeous day here on the Stony Ridge Farm. It's winter time and it's cving season. What? I don't make no sense. Everybody else keeps telling me we need to have our calves in the springtime when it's warm outside. Well, maybe, but maybe not. Let's talk a little bit about this today and about this cow calf operation and what we're doing here on the Stony Ridge farm to make sure that our animals are healthy and the things that we need to consider when it comes time for our animals to calf. I'm going to tell you some mistakes that I've made here on the farm and some things that I've learned over the last 5 years raising these cattle. Five maybe seven years now raising cattle here in North Carolina. All right, folks. Welcome back to the Stony Ridge Farm. This is your first time here, please hit that like button. Subscribe to the channel. Love to have you back. Even if it ain't your first time. Hit the like button. Hit the little bell notification. It'll tell you when I post another video. So, we're out here with the cows. You can see they are chowing down right now. I just unrolled a bail of hay to them with the Greg Judy bail unroller. And what I do here, especially in wintertime, is all about low impact and feeding the soil. This is a regenerative farm. And I know some people as soon as they hear that regenerative farm, they want to click off of it. It's not a catchphrase. It's farming the way things used to be. Before we had the fertilizer truck that could come and spread chemical fertilizers. It's farming and it's thinking about the soil. And it's actually farming not to get green grass, but to build soil for the future, to keep good soil for the future. And that's what it's all about. And that's what we're trying to do here on the Stony Ridge farm is accomplish soil building whilst earning a living on the farm, which is important. This is my retirement plan. We're on 150 acre first generation farm project here, and it is my retirement plan. I want to be able to pull out 50 to $60,000 a year off of the farm when I retire. I know a lot of you guys have been watching the channel, and you've seen where we're talking about downsizing. Well, that deal did not go through. Uh, I was looking at a smaller piece of property with 11 acres. Was going to try and downsize my life a little bit, downsize the farm, downsize the work. Well, the stars were not aligned for that. If you haven't seen that video, it's posted at the end of this. You'll see a link to it. So, what we're talking about right now is cving season. And a lot of people practice a lot of different sciences when it comes to cving season and when our animals should have our calves. Now, this is a small farm. Again, it's 150 acre first generation farm here. I've got about 85 fenced acres, and we're running somewhere between 50 and 55 cows. Right now, we have 32 cows and a donkey. The donkeys out here as a guard animal, which helps protect the young calves from being attacked by coyotes. We don't have wolves or anything like that out here, so coyotes are our main focus. Now, when it comes to cving season, if you live in Montana, you don't want to cave in January, okay? You don't want to cave when it's 10° below zero, 20° below zero, and the wind is whipping. You see, uh, other farms and ranches struggle with this, having calves at the wrong time of year for their climate. Now, we are in a temperate climate here in North Carolina, and we don't have to worry about that so much. So, it is right now early January, and my temperature is going to be up to 58° here today. That's not a concern for CVing. In fact, cows prefer a temperature around 55°. That's what they prefer. A little information for you if you don't know cattle and if you don't know um how this all works. If a calf is born in the summertime, it has its summer coat on. If a calf is born in the winter time, it comes out fluffy and fuzzy. That's just how it works. It doesn't come out of the mom in the wintertime with a thin summer coat. It comes out robust and strong and ready to be a calf, ready to drink and healthy. If you've got an unhealthy animal, it's not going to make any difference whether it's wintertime or summertime. You're still going to have to take care of that unhealthy animal. We don't have a lot of trouble with birthing because we have a South Pole bull, which is Donnie over here. He's a smaller bull, a smaller stature bull with larger stature cattle. When we have that, we don't have trouble birthing. Now, if you live in a place like Missouri where it's 10° below zero this time of year, uh then you may want to consider CVing in the springtime during the spring flush. But you really don't have to consider it so much here in a place like North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, virtually 3/4 of the country, you don't have to worry about this. Okay? even West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, you guys were not having to worry so much because these are again very strong, very robust animals. Now, if you're out west, if you're in Missouri, if you're in Montana, if you're in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, these places that get subzero temperatures, that's when you really want to focus on having your calves sometime in March, April, May, really April, May, June. I leave my bull with my cows here all the time. A cow's gestation period is 9 months, just like a woman. A cow ovulates once per month. Okay, just a lunar cycle just like a human. Okay, nine months to carry the baby. They ovulate every month. So, every time we have a calf, a month later, Donnie is making a new calf, right? So, we're rotating through and eventually we'll have our cows to where they might produce a calf in January and then another calf in December. So, we're getting more productivity out of our animals by leaving the bull with the the cows. Okay? We don't need to focus so much on the spring flush. And I really, this was preached to me when I first started farming, first started ranching, is that I need my cows to hit the ground, my baby calves to hit the ground right at the spring flush, right when the weather was just popping. And what I found is that increases the fly load, increases the insect load on the animals, it increases the workload on the farmer because the grass is taller and I can't find the calves. They're all buried up in the grass. So, what I'm finding is letting them naturally cycle through and breed and have their calves is what's been working the best with me here in North Carolina. Again, you live in Montana, you live in Utah, you live in a cold climate, you don't want a cal with with 10 degrees below zero and a 40 mph wind. You don't want to do that. I don't even know how they ranch out there like that. I It's just too much to even consider. And I know they lose a lot of animals like that. They just have to lose a lot of animals because you can't be there on the ground 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a 10,000 acre ranch. You just can't do that. So, just want to give you guys a little bit of science here behind what's going on in this area of the country. And I'd say you're probably safe anywhere from Ohio down in the southern states to cal virtually year round. There's some more science behind the finances of caling year round as well. So, I can take these calves to market at about six or seven months once they're weaned. Five to to eight months. Let's just say that once they're weaned, I can take them to market. Do I want to take all of my animals? I want to have them born in April and May and then take all of them to the sail barn at the end of the year when everybody's taking their animals to the sail barn and it drives the prices down. So, what I want to do is I want to cal throughout the year and I want to take a load in August and then I want to take a load in October and then I want to take a load in January or February. So, I've got to think this through financially. Your market is being flooded at the sail barn with cow cap operations like this near the end of the year. So, the second half of December is historically when the prices have been driven down the most at the sail barn. So, think about that guys. If you're cving year round, that means you're selling year round. That means you're growing year round. That means no calf is going to mature at exactly the same time as the rest. Now, we've had six calves drop in the last two weeks. Awesome. Awesome stuff. That will probably be my first load that goes to the sail barn this year or selling to folks that come to the farm to buy cattle. So, that's just a little bit of the science here. If you're living in Texas, you ain't got to worry about cving in the early early spring. Just know that you're feeding mama cows and you might have to give a little protein supplement and you're going to have to give good high quality hay and you might have to do exactly what we're doing here with low impact machines rolling hay out onto the land so that the cows don't disturb the land and make a big mess and a big mud hole. Driving around right now, you guys driving around this winter. Look at those farms that you're seeing on the side of the road that are feeding these cows in a hay ring all at one spot up next to the barn. It's a mess. It's muddy. They're waiting belly deep in their own manure. And when they're doing that, we're having to give them medications. These cows have not been wormed in 4 years. Four years. No dewormer. They get dependent on that crap and they weigh belly deep in their own manure. And if you're eating in the bathroom, you're going to get sick, right? Just makes sense. Guys, thanks a lot. I hope you learned a little bit. There's a lot of information out here. Uh I hope you'll stick with me on the farm. Be sure you're subscribed. Hit that little bell. It notifies you when I post a new video. And we've got a couple more videos coming here at the end of this one. Stick around, click them, watch them. Let's have some fun. I got to go take care of some stuff at the shop. See you next time on the Stony Ridge. Y'all come back now. You here?