Interview on Low Stress Cattle Handling With Bob Kinford

Agricultural Insights interview 059 with Bob Kinford on low stress cattle handling. To attend or host a clinic by me, visit my website for more information.

Reducing Input Expenses

In my last two posts, I discussed how much money you can be throwing away through poor cattle handling procedures and the true worth of your cattle after inflation is taken into consideration. While changing your cattle handling methods is an easy fix, trying to cut other inputs can seem to be insurmountable. However it can be easier than you can imagine.

Labor

If you have more than one full time employee for every thousand head of cows, or two thousand head of yearlings, you are over staffed. If you practice reduced stress cattle handling methods, and get through your cattle once or twice a week, the only time you should need extra help is when you are branding, weaning, shipping, or preconditioning.

Fuel Mechanical Maintenance

Nearly everyone spends more time in their pickup or on four wheelers than they do a horse. In many cases (especially if your ranch is in rough country) you really can't go any faster in a pickup than you can on a horse. Even if your roads are in good enough shape to go faster, why burn the fuel and tear up an expensive truck or ATV? I recently talked with one rancher who runs 1,500 pairs, plus a few hundred yearling heifers. He is running three employees and burns up over 1,000 gallons of gas and diesel each month in three pickups checking waterlines. That is an expense of nearly $4,000 in fuel before you figure in wear and tear on the trucks, flat tires and an extra full time employee.

I have run 2,200 yearlings plus an additional 150 pairs on 50,000 acres with no help and burned less than 45 gallons of fuel a month (with the exception of running to town for mineral or other supplies every other month.) The amount of fuel NOT burned amounts to 820 gallons a month. At $3.40 gas this amounts a reduction in input amounts of over $30,000 a year in fuel expenses alone.

Your wheels are turning, and you are thinking of all of the longer hours you will be putting in without your pickup or ATV. When running the above ranch, I ran the waterlines on a motorcycle Saturday morning and was off the ranch by noon. I would do a quick run on Monday morning just to make sure there were no new leaks. During the week, I was seldom home later than 5 or 5:30.

Additional Benefits

The first benefit is one you may not have thought of, your health and stress level. You, or your employee will remain healthier, both physically and emotionally, riding a horse than bouncing around in a pickup. Second, your cattle see you and will be calmer when you go to gather. This also means you see your cattle and know where they are, reducing or eliminating going back out to gather remnants at shipping time. If you plan your riding carefully, you will be checking your fences regularly and keep them in a better state of repair.

Direct Cattle Management

As I have pointed out before, using reduced stress cattle handling methods can increase ADG's with no added input. If you are running pairs, time your calving season to coincide with green grass. If you are in an area of cold and snow, this can cut your feed bill by two-thirds. You can either sell your excess hay or adjust your herd size to make up for the difference. Once again, this goes with the principle of reducing inputs while increasing income.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or email me.

Taking Cattle Through Gates

Last week I covered starting and moving your cattle in a way which instills herd instinct in your cattle. Taking cattle through gates can either be one of the easiest things we can do with our cattle or one of the most stressful things we can do to our cattle, and ourselves.

Too many people tend to wait to open the gate until all of the cattle have reached the gate. This results in the cattle being forcibly crowded up to the fence. This creates stress on the cattle as they do not like to be forced together. When we are moving pairs this assures that the cattle will not be paired once they are through the gate. If we can have the gate open before the cattle get there, it is a simple matter of pointing them towards the gate without stopping the motion.

If the motion does stop, the only two things we need to work on is keeping the everything pointing towards the gate, and getting the cattle at the front to go through without pushing from the back. When you do this properly all of the cattle will go together, strung out as a herd naturally moves. Once they start through, the lead may pick up speed and may even run and play a bit. As long as they are headed in the right direction there is nothing to worry about as they tend to slow down on their own.

The two hundred steers in the following video had only been on the place a week. The only other time I had moved them was taking them from the pens where they had been unloaded, to this pasture. Not only was this the first time they had been through this gate, the pup I was using is deaf, and I didn't have a shock collar. Needless to say she made a few mistakes (to put it mildly) but the steers still all made it through the gate, and acted as a herd once they went through.



Taking cattle through a gate in the middle of a fence is actually easier than taking them through a gate in a corner. Take the cattle to a point a hundred yards to either side of the gate and have them turn down the fence towards the gate. Ride along, or just in front of the lead animals. When you reach the gate, simply get in front of the lead animals and position yourself so that the lead will go around and by you. They will see the gate and go through easily.

Starting and Turning Your Cattle as a Herd

In my last post I described how to begin training cattle to act as a herd. When cattle begin acting as a herd, they will all be facing in the same direction when grazing, as in the picture. It doesn't matter if you have a herd of thirty, three hundred or over a thousand, the cattle will be facing the same direction like in this photo.

Their natural instinct at this point is for everyone to follow the lead animals. By simply taking advantage of their instinct to go by you, the cattle will automatically start up as you make your approach from the front. If you try starting them from the back you will not get them to go in the same direction. Starting the herd from the back is asking the cattle on the lower end of the pecking order to pass up the cattle which are higher on the order. Rather than pass them up directly they will tend to go around them, resulting in the cattle starting out in three different directions.

One thing you need to remember. Cattle are comfortable and relaxed in a tight situation if they feel it was their idea to do so. When you force them into the situation, it causes stress similar to being pursued by predators. Therefore it is in your best interest to handle them so that they want to act as a herd. Anything you do to work against their herd instinct will only make you work harder to move your cattle, let alone getting them to behave as a herd.

Another area of concern is turning your herd. When following a fence line, there is a tendency to ride between the cattle and the fence, from the back to turn them. This results in the back end turning before the front end and the cattle spreading out. When turning a herd in open country the tendency is often to ride at the shoulders of the lead cattle to force them to turn. Once again, the key word her is force. Anytime you are forcing the cattle to do something, you are creating stress in the cattle which creates more work for you and your horse.

When your cattle are acting as a herd (or if you are wanting them to start doing so) you need to take advantage of every situation to let them do what you want, rather than forcing them to do so. When the cattle are going down a fence, simply ride past the cattle from far enough out that you do not slow them down or stop them. When you are in front of the cattle turn and ride at an angle towards the lead cattle. As you are riding toward them, the lead cattle will actually speed up to go around you and turn in the direction you want. You may have to make an adjustment in how much they are turning, but with a little practice, they will be turning nearly exactly the angle you are wanting them to turn. Herd instinct will take over and the rest of the herd will follow on their own.

This same method will also work when changing direction in open country. Rather than forcing the cattle to turn set them up to go around you. For instance, if you want to turn the cattle to the left, ride ahead of the cattle on the left side of them. When you want them to turn, simply ride towards them at an angle. This will allow the cattle to follow their instinct to speed up and go around you. Once the lead has made their turn, you can simply stop and let the rest of the cattle to follow them.

You have probably noticed I use the terms “allow” and “let” quite a bit when describing how to move cattle. This is because when you are handling cattle correctly, you are only setting yourself up to take advantage of the natural instincts of cattle. Simply put, when you approach cattle in any manner their reactions are what their instincts are telling them to do. If you try forcing things you are working against their instinct to act calmly as a her. By keeping your patience and making the right approaches, you are allowing them to make their own decision to go where you want as a herd.

Next week we will discuss taking cattle through gates in a way which instills herd effect. If you have any questions be sure to post them in the comments and I will answer them!

Evaluating Our Management

It is that time of year again. No, I'm not talking about Christmas. It is the time of year that all of the trade publications are encouraging you to re-evaluate your management and pay your dues to the cattleman's associations. I think it is not only time to re-evaluate your cow herd management, but to also evaluate how these publications are suggesting we manage our cattle.

The sustainability of any cattle operation is dependent upon profitability. Nearly anything we do to increase income seems to involve putting money out to accomplish. As an industry, we have acquired a mindset which dictates we must spend money to save money. This is a mindset which we need to get away from. There are too much of what we are doing as an industry which are adding to operating expenses which we take for granted as being necessary could be changed.

The educational system doesn't help. Rather than giving advice as to reducing costs associated with calving January to March, they give advice on how much feed and nutrients cattle need during the third trimester during the holiday season (as in a recent article from the University of Ohio). A study just started this fall at of Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture is examining the difference between calving in September/October vs January/February.

If you have a ranch, or are managing one for someone else, you need to be thinking of two things, sustainability and profitability of the range land and cattle. If you are calving at a time of year that requires you to feed extra hay and supplement to your cattle during the extra trimester, you are cutting into the profitability of your cattle. If you are feeding your calves as well as feeding enough for your cattle to lactate and hold body condition, you are cutting into your profitability. You should be asking yourself why there are no studies being done on timing the third trimester so that cattle are calving on green grass rather than purchased feed and supplement.


Simple logic dictates that calving on grass is less expensive than paying for hay production and extra supplements. Just how much can you save? I have one friend who calved in June/July in western Colorado who didn't feed his cattle at all. I have another friend in Nebraska who changed to a late April/early June calving season and he now feeds 2/3 less hay. Both men weaned at an correspondingly later time, with nearly identical weights to winter calving. How much money would you be adding to your profit line if you could cut your hay bill by 2/3? Could you make even more money by selling the excess hay you have been feeding, or increase the size of your herd with the savings?

Another area in which advice given by universities and publications is pasture management. There are many articles out there which give the benefits of rotational grazing programs, but all of them require intensive labor and monetary investment in permanent and temporary fencing to control grazing. Can we really be more sustainable, or get more profit when we are spending more time and money to accomplish the same task of harvesting grass?

Then we have all of the articles on reduced stress cattle handling. There are two kinds of articles in this category. The first kind are the ones which appear as if they were written from a template. They contain all of the buzz phrases “slower is faster,” “flight zone,” “pressure and release,” then go on to explain the benefits. Yet they fail to really describe how to handle your cattle with less stress.

The other category is people who have no real understanding of how cattle work other than to train them by the Pavlov's Dog method. This method prescribes training your cattle to lead, which of course is accomplished by using feed. This may sound like a good method but it is much like gentling a horse by feeding it, without asking it to do anything. When you get them in the pens and start sorting or working them, like the horse, they may have no fear of you, but they don't have any respect either. The end result is still more stress on the cattle than needed.

Cattle are herd animals. Yet we have been trained over the years to think it is normal for our cattle to spread out across the pasture when we let them through the gate. We have been “educated” to believe we need fences to keep them where we want, and several people to move them. We have been educated on this so much that most people don't recognize actual herd behavior when they see it. In fact this lack of recognizing what a herd looks like is so bad, that I have had people inform me there was something wrong with cattle when I had them working as a herd. Next week I will begin describing not only how cattle act as a herd, but also how to re-establish herd behavior in your cattle.

The final thing I want to touch on this week is the current high market in live cattle. Your banker will be encouraging you to go into more debt for cattle because they are worth so much. Of course this is standard protocol when the market is going up. The problem is that the cattle market is cyclical, which is exacerbated by the global market and whatever flavor of the month USDA comes up with for meat imports. Prices were at or below breakeven for many producers until Canada had a case of mad cow disease. As soon as the access to Canadian cattle was closed, US prices went back up. Despite the current bear market on cattle, I would recommend you resist the temptation to acquire debt to build your herd. In fact, this may be the best time to liquidate your herd to someone who is following their banker's advice. Then you can lease your pastures to yearlings and sell your hay, or lease to pairs where you are guaranteed profitability. By carefully managing your finances, you will be solvent enough to rebuild your herd when the market drops again. When the others are going bankrupt, or getting out of the business because cattle aren't worth anything, you will be able to shift your income from leasing to selling cattle.

Until next week, have a Merry Christmas and think out of the box!