The_Ledger_Summer_2020

Making Calving a Great Experience

BY HANNAH JOHLMAN, CONTRIBUTING WRITER E ight years ago, Neil Biwer realized he had a prob lem: his first-calf heifers were struggling to breed back and he couldn’t put his finger on why. Biwer was raising commercial, black-hided cattle and, at the time, was breeding them to the lowest birthweight bulls he could find until he heard about a program his neighbor was using. “My neighbor couldn’t always keep someone there help ing him part time and he couldn’t always be there, so he decided to try these American Aberdeen over his first-calf heifers,” Biwer says. “He had some pretty good success with it, and he said to me one day, ‘Well, what do you think, Neil?’” Biwer had a feeling most of his heifers’ problems were from stress during calving, something that he thought per haps American Aberdeen genetics could alleviate. “I really felt like we’d gone to as low of birthweight bulls as we could, but we were still assisting a lot of our calves,” he says. “I wanted to get to a point where, in my mind, this heifer had a really good calving experience. So I decided to buy some American Aberdeen cattle, and, actually, I bought a whole bunch.” He was more than pleased with the result, not only with how many heifers bred back for their second calf, but also with the healthy, crossbred calves that he says are un questioningly healthier due to their complete hybrid vigor. From a calving difficulty standpoint, Biwer says it’s also been a no-brainer, considering any calving difficulty has basically gone away. So not only has the experience been better for his heifers, it’s been better for him as well. “Sure, we help a few, but it’s extremely minimal now,” he says, adding that when he first got started in the cattle business in the early 1980s, he had to pull nearly every calf. “I’m really good at it, but I don’t like doing it any more. I’m an old guy now.” In addition, Biwer says that when the crossbred calves are standing next to not fully-grown heifers, the sizes just “add up.” “The calf isn’t too big. When the heifer has this calf, the calf marches right up and the udder fits perfectly with the calf,” Biwer says. “These first-calf heifers aren’t real big yet, and so many times I’ve seen big calves that can’t get their heads down and don’t suck. It just doesn’t work out.

With this breed, they’re perfect.” Most impor tant though, Biwer has seen his first-calf heif ers have a great first experience giving birth and being mothers, and out of 200 bred heifers each year, only a handful now fall out of the herd due to be ing open. “I really do think it’s because of this program,” Biwer says. Biwer didn’t have the great

est luck one year when he and his neighbor tried putting crossbred American Aber deen bulls over their heifers. “That was an absolute failure,” Biwer says. “The prob lem was, we were playing Russian roulette and occasion ally we got a really big calf.” Since then, Biwer has bought fullblood American Aberdeen bulls from Neil Effertz, Scott Caron and Dwane Riedemann; he appreciates the opportunity to purchase bulls from these breeders. Biwer runs five bulls per every hundred heifers, and has been more than pleased with their longevity, libido and soundness. “I got five bulls five years ago and all five of the bulls still pass their soundness test, and I’m still using them,” he says. “I think that’s just a great number.” The first few years, Biwer calved around April 15 and sold 450-pound crossbred calves straight off the heifers. More recently, he has been taking crossbred calves to Neil Biwer and wife, Cherlyn, along with their son, Bradley, and his wife, Cheyenne, operate the ranch and 1,000-head feedlot with the help of ranch dogs, Mia and Chloe.

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Calving season isn’t as stressful as it used to be, for either the humans or the livestock involved.

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