Tips and Technology for Receiving Calves

Jared Ranly highlights key strategies to increase profits and performance in backgrounding operations.

What makes a backgrounding enterprise successful? Is it good cattle, health protocols, good nutrition or thorough record-keeping? The answer – all of the above!

A healthy, high-performing calf for the backgrounder and feeder starts on the ranch level.

“It’s beneficial if we can get some pre-weaning vaccines into those cattle… castrate those bull calves as soon as possible… and deworm those calves before they get sent off,” says Jared Ranly. “Let’s think about the good of the industry and how much we can help the calves and people in the next phase.”

Ranly is a Texas veterinarian, backgrounder and cow-calf producer who is passionate about helping others raise healthy calves and have successful operations.

How long calves have been weaned also makes a big difference in how high-risk they are for the next phase.

He says, “The highest risk calves we see are those short-term weaned calves, where they're maybe weaned for around two or three weeks, and then they get sent to a background or a stocker operation. Those calves really wreak a lot of havoc in our system.”

Instead, consider the following options.

“I’d rather have those calves right off the cow or weaned for a minimum of 45 days,” says Ranly.

Once calves are off the ranch, backgrounders can also take key steps to have a successful receiving period starting from day one.

“We want to rest them overnight with good quality hay and good quality water,” says Ranly. “After that we want to get these cattle processed as soon as we can and get them turned back out into pasture or go to their home trap where they're going to be on feed.”

He also emphasizes the importance of nutrition for calves before, during and after backgrounding.

He says, “Nutrition is so critical in this transition phase… have a real good palatable feed, whether it be a forage source or a feed source, that we can transition these calves onto to set them up for the best possible health program.”

Don’t forget the value of a veterinarian as a backgrounder either.

“Reach out and find a veterinarian ahead of time and don’t wait until you’re in a disaster mode,” says Ranly. “Let that vet develop a vaccination program and a treatment program, so we can try to put out these fires before we get into those situations.”

Having a successful backgrounding operation goes beyond good cattle, solid health programs and quality nutrition. Record keeping is essential.

Ranly says, “Good record keeping lets me actually see what's going on. Without the data, we can't narrow in and focus on the true problem—we’re just throwing darts at the wall guessing.”

The method of record keeping also makes a difference.

“The guys that are on notepads don’t always know where they're at,” says Ranly. “They're probably really nervous about the market and hesitant to sell because they don’t know if this profit is good enough.”

Multifaceted digital platforms are the preference for Ranly and his clients.

“If we can use a program like Performance Beef and we can know exactly what our true breakeven is, we're not panicking when we're selling them,” says Ranly. “We can be comfortable with the profit margin and roll on.”

Easily accessing ration costs and cost of gain are key features of Performance Beef.

He says, “That’s where we’ve seen some game changing—with clients who thought they had a cheap ration, but when we analyzed cost of gain through Performance Beef, we realized changes needed to be made.”

The bigger picture of digital record keeping comes down to making management decisions with more confidence.

“By taking all this data in, it can really let us focus on issues we need to address and fine tune the operation.” says Ranly. “We can find out what a set of cattle from a source is really worth—can we pay them a premium or do we need to discount those cattle?”

Remember a successful backgrounding operation not only crosses their t’s and dots their i’s with animal health and nutrition, they also invest in tools that allow them to know where they stand financially today and over the long term.

Listen to the full conversation on the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast.