From the Barns: Preg-check pays off

Sometime around mid-June, the rain started slacking off. Finally drying up some and returning to normal summertime weather in southern Illinois, which is hot, humid with occasional pop-up showers or storms. It is extremely green around here for this time of year and one of the few benefits from all the moisture we have had is there is a lot of pasture and grass to graze. The forecast for the upcoming week is more of the same, maybe with increased chances of rain.

The AI breeding has slowed up. The heifers that came back in heat got re-bred and I think we will see if anymore come back in. After that, it will soon be time to preg-check them and at that point all open heifers will head to the feedlot. The cows we observed daily and any of those that showed signs of estrus, we bred those again, as well. By having the HeatSiecker patches on this year, it allowed for digital alerts of estrus and not having to spend as much time visually observing the cows in person. Hopefully that will pay off in more ways than one.

We recently had Dr. Huels down from Altamont to put embryos in 25 head. That makes close to 50 that have been put in this year alone. The early set that was done, we have not seen many of those females come back into heat. Hopefully, that is a sign that most of them took and are carrying a pregnancy. Of course, we won’t know for sure until we do a pregnancy check and we should be able to do that relatively soon.

The last week or two we got to clean manure out of some pens and actually spread it on some fields. Also got shade tarps up where needed. Now onto some fencing work that needs to be done, some repair and the building of some new, as well. One of the projects we didn’t get to complete this spring was the sowing of sudangrass. It just stayed way too wet for too long, so we decided not to plant it knowing that we would have shorter grazing time available and also worried about the stand we might get due to the wet conditions. Decided not to risk that investment. We will hold the seed over until next year and hopefully get it in the ground then. The positive of that is that it is providing us with 100-plus acres of ground that we can get manure applied on.

We have shipped a couple of loads of fats this past month, and I anticipate at least one, if not two more, over the next 30 days. I look for mid-August to mid-October to have several loads to ship out. We still have not been placing any new feeder cattle in lately, due to availability, but more importantly due to the cost of those feeder cattle. At this point, I don’t expect much new activity in placing cattle until we get into the fall run, which when you think about it isn’t all that far away.

Tomorrow, Wyatt and I are flying out of St. Louis going to Denver, taking a short vacation. He is off work this week from UPS and wanted to go somewhere during his time off. I can certainly use some time away myself, but as always hate to leave for fear of what might happen while I’m gone and placing all the load on others. Hopefully, I will be able to relax and enjoy the time with my son, as we drive around Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. Hoping for a good trip and that all goes well at home.