I often ask myself, when is a cow too old to be kept in my herd?

The simple answer is that I never cull for age. But at the same time, 90% of my cows have had five calves or less, so in general, I have a very young herd. In the last ten years, I can’t remember culling a cow because she was too old.

Farmer Writes: No room for passengers in suckling.

I do have one older cow. She is a plain red Salers animal, nothing fancy to look at, but it’s what she has done that makes the difference.

She has held first time to AI every year, always calves on her own and always rears one of the heaviest calves. She has just been slipping along for years and never really been noticed.

This year, when we were registering her calf, I realised that I hadn’t any other cows with anywhere near as low an ear tag number as her. I decided to look up my herd book and calving records. I couldn’t believe that she was almost fourteen and has had twelve calves (all singles).

Of those, a number were heifer calves that were kept for cows, and some of them have already been culled from the herd.

After noting that, I decided that I needed to take a closer look, and decide if I wanted to keep her for another year.

I assessed her up and down for faults and checked the calf to see how well it was doing and if she was fit to feed it. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any problems.

I kept telling myself to think of the age. If the cow goes in-calf again she will be fifteen before it’s reared. But I couldn’t come up with a good excuse to cull her, so it looks like she is going to be kept for another year.

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This has got me thinking about my whole herd of cows and their age profile.

I am hard on them, and if they do something wrong, they very rarely get a second chance. I have lots of heifers coming in every year so I’m always on the lookout for excuses to cull cows.

I only give cows two chances with AI and if they don’t go in-calf they are out. The same goes if they have a temperament issue. Then you have the normal reasons to cull, such as mastitis and lameness.

The only time I might give a cow a second chance is if they had a hard calving or a poor performing calf. In both cases, it might have been my fault – either overfed in the run up to calving, or perhaps not fed well enough after calving.

There are lots of other things that could push them towards culling. Getting too heavy, being a bully when in the house and suckling other cows. These on their own won’t cause me to cull, but it can help tip them over if there is any doubt.

Money

You might well wonder how I manage to have any older animals at all and maybe I am being too hard on them, but they are here to do a job for me and there’s definitely not enough money to be made in suckling to be able to carry passengers. Removing problem animals generally keeps the average age down.

You could also argue that the older cows (more than five calves) on this farm are the best cows, as they have just slipped along each year without drawing any attention to themselves. And best of all is this ordinary looking red Salers.

At the moment, I won’t be culling for age, unless someone can persuade me otherwise.

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