Tagging and Banding
Welcome to Spring little one! As we start up our Kawasaki Mule, the cows know that a bag of range cubes is on the way. Range Cubes must be delicious because the cows come running. Training cows to range cubes makes them easy to work with in a stress-free way. It also distracts the momma's as we take care of newborn calves.
We love calving season. Baby calves are everywhere! It is so exciting to find a new one.
Whenever we notice that a momma is not with the herd, we drive around to look for her, and we usually find her hiding with a brand new baby.
When a new baby is born, we put a tag in their ear for identification, and we band the boys to make them into steers for our Wagyu beef program.
It is easiest to catch calves on the day they are born. It’s a whole new game once they get past a day old. Sometimes we get lucky and catch them, like the one you see in the picture below. Tim was able to grab it by the hind legs and hold on while I get the proper color tag ready with all of the important information.
But other times we just have to wait until they are older so we can run them through the chute. So far this year, we have five babies and all of them are tagged and the boys are all banded.
Record keeping is important. I don’t know how other farmers keep records, but we have a system that works for us. We use yellow tags for the girls and blue tags for the boys so that out in the field, we know a lot of information at a glance. The tag has the momma’s number on the top, with the month and day on the bottom. In this picture you see blue tag 53 4-22, which tells us this is a boy, and he was born in April 2022. We keep the actual birthday and all of their vaccination records in a spreadsheet, but this is all we really need to know at a glance. Also, if we keep a heifer from one of the mommas, let’s use 53 as an example, then her herd tag becomes 153 or 253.
Tagging and record keeping helps us to make decisions about our herd. And since we sell sides of beef, we ask our customers to let us know if their meat is tender and marbled. We only keep breeding stock that produces good beef.
And speaking of good beef, we have one side of beef available this month, and a few more in the months to come. Place your deposit today!
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