Preparing for Breeding Season - Male to Female Ratios

Goals for Breeding Season

Breeding season will be here before we know it and with it, bull turnout. In our area, we are fortunate to have many outstanding registered seedstock breeders who will be marketing bulls this Spring. The opportunity to invest in genetics to improve the profit potential of your operation may have you wondering what exactly you should be looking for.

The first goal of the breeding season is to get cows bred early, resulting in more calves born early in the calving season, which leads to an older calf at weaning and ultimately, more pay weight at weaning. The typical beef calf gains about 2 lbs./day up until weaning, accordingly a calf born one heat cycle (21 days) earlier will wean off about 40 lbs. heavier. How do we get this accomplished? One important factor is having an adequate amount of bulls to get cows serviced. The following shows a conservative expectation of the number of cows we should expect bulls to cover in a defined breeding season.