There are only 29 million beef cows in the U.S. – the lowest inventory since 1962. And the combination of increasing world population and an increasing standard of living in most developing countries will result in increased demand for meat over the next several decades. Providing an increased supply of beef at a reasonable price will be difficult, particularly if sustainable production methods are to be used.
Mature beef cows on cow-calf operations are provided with feed year-round to produce one weaned calf per year. And there is a decline in the cow’s value for beef over her lifetime after the birth of her first calf.
If the need to maintain a mature cow herd can be eliminated by means of having each first-calf heifer replace herself with a heifer calf that she produces, every animal in the enterprise will be growing at all times.
Doing so could result in up to a 30 percent increase in beef production without increasing the net amount of feed required. And, simultaneously, greenhouse gas emissions could be decreased per unit of beef produced.
Beef production without mature cows
The “beef production without mature cows” system we are proposing involves inseminating yearling heifers with sexed semen, weaning their calves early at 90 days post-calving, feeding a grain-based diet for a short period to the dams (70 to 90 days) and harvesting the dams prior to 30 months old to produce a high-quality carcass (Figure 1).
This scenario greatly reduces the total amount of feed needed per pound of beef produced while also decreasing water use and production of greenhouse gases and manure.
It has been estimated that about two-thirds (65 to 70 percent) of the nutrients consumed for routine beef production are attributed to the cow-calf enterprise, including getting calves to weaning age.
As seen in Figure 2 these nutrients are used for cow maintenance, pregnancy and lactation; for maintenance and growth of calves up to weaning; and for replacement heifers and natural-service bulls. And about 30 percent goes toward the post-weaning maintenance and growth of calves (the stocker/feedlot segments).
Most recent efforts to improve the efficiency of beef production have focused on post-weaning improvements to cattle production – from weaning through harvest via intensification of cattle production, often through use of technologies (e.g., growth-promoting implants, beta-agonists, ionophores, feed additives, etc.). However, tremendous opportunity exists to improve production efficiency via the cow-calf segment.
In beef cows, feed is used to support maintenance, growth, lactation and gestation. Feed can also go to fat deposition, but fat stores come and go throughout the year and the net result is zero.
However, for all classes of beef cattle (cows, calves, etc.), maintenance is the largest requirement. As seen in Figure 2, 50 percent of all nutrients needed in the beef production system go to maintain the cow herd. In fact, of all nutrients consumed by a beef cow, 75 to 80 percent go toward maintenance of the cow, with just 20 to 25 percent available for production (i.e., gestation, lactation or growth).
Unfortunately, no beef is produced in exchange for this expenditure since the cows do not grow after they reach approximately 3 years old. Thus, of all the feed utilized to produce a pound of beef for a consumer to eat, about half of the feed was used to simply maintain the mature cow (the dam of the animal used to create the pound of beef).
Longevity vs. replacement
It has been estimated that the system we are proposing eliminates the need for the approximately 50 percent of nutrients consumed in the total beef enterprise that go to maintaining older cows for their lifetimes.
However, more nutrients are required for growth because 100 percent of animals are growing.
Conventional thinking has focused on maximizing longevity in beef cows, so that the cost of raising a replacement heifer can be spread across more calves in a cow’s lifetime.
However, this system may in fact not be the most efficient production arrangement for beef producers, due in part to the fact that efficiency is better in younger females since less feed is needed for maintenance.
Thus, more rapid turnover of a cow herd via increased replacement rate actually improves production efficiency of management systems.
Early research into beef production efficiency showed that as the number of calves born per cow decreased, production efficiency increased. Thus, the traditional production system in which producers focus on maximizing the number of calves born per cow is less efficient than a single-calf system.
This efficiency occurs when the dam “assumes the role” of slaughter offspring, and much of the overhead cost of producing a calf disappears and is replaced by productive growth.
In 1987, Colorado State University researchers Rick Bourdon and Jim Brinks stated that “the younger the cow herd, the greater the proportion of total feed used for weight production and the smaller the proportion used for maintenance, lactation, gestation and regaining of body condition.” Ultimately, the quicker a replacement female can be generated and the dam harvested, the greater the efficiency.
Additional benefits and costs of this system
The fringe benefits of this system are substantive. Perhaps the main one is that there are no nursing, growing first-calf heifers to re-breed. Pregnancy rates for first-calf heifers are notoriously low, resulting in culling many of these prime young females unless high amounts of energy-dense feed are supplied.
There also are no old cows, which are prone to problems with feet and legs, mastitis, diseased eyes and other age-related ailments. Also, all beef produced is from young, growing animals, whereas with conventional systems a substantial amount of beef is from old, culled cows that are discounted in market value.
Because a minimal number of male calves are produced in this system, there is also an animal welfare benefit due to decreased numbers of calves needing castration.
A marked genetic benefit is that generation interval is greatly reduced on the female side, which results in about twice the opportunities to make genetic progress per unit time.
There are also additional costs with this system. All calves are born to first-calf heifers, which on average have higher rates of dystocia than cows.
However, use of easy-calving A.I. sires reduces this risk and the majority of calves will be heifers, which average about 5 pounds lighter at birth than bulls and therefore have reduced incidence of dystocia.
Perhaps the greatest additional cost is lower fertility with sexed versus conventional semen. However, sperm sexing procedures are improving rapidly, so this fertility gap should narrow substantively over time.
This system is also not entirely self-sustaining, in which each heifer would replace herself with the heifer calf that she produces. This is due to factors that include calf death loss, the fact that less than 100 percent of calves are female (due to imperfect sex selection of sperm and use of clean-up bulls), and failure of some heifers to become pregnant.
However, this system could be up to 75 to 80 percent self-sustaining, thus requiring only a small percentage of heifers from outside the system to be added each year.
That number may be slightly higher than conventional beef-production systems, but the cost per replacement will likely be lower because replacements are younger, smaller and productive sooner.
Finally, heifers grow slightly less efficiently than steers, although use of anabolic implants can compensate for this. And since 30 months is the oldest age at which an animal’s carcass may be classified as A maturity, there also is the possibility of discounts for carcasses from 28-month-old to 30-month-old heifers that may have physiologically advanced bone ossification (used by USDA graders when assigning quality grade) as a result of pregnancy.
However, it has been shown that first-calf heifers able to grade the equivalent of USDA choice at harvest prior to 30 months old have been valued at 30 percent more per pound than cull cows.
Ultimately, recovering merited price and grade would require marketing cattle outside of traditional fed cattle value-based marketing systems (e.g., grid pricing).
Conclusions
The extra costs of the proposed system appear to be more than offset by the fringe benefits, but the overriding value is not having to feed and manage a cow herd.
Management for the proposed system needs to be at a high level, and to some extent, labor substitutes for feed, possibly resulting in more jobs per unit of beef produced.
Several unanswered questions remain, including the ultimate profitability of this system, actual meat quality from these cattle versus fed cattle typically produced by the industry (e.g., steers and heifers 13 months old to 22 months old at harvest) and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and manure.
Researchers at Colorado State University have initiated a long-term trial that will evaluate four cohorts through a “beef production without mature cows” system. The first cohort was harvested in late September, and results will be forthcoming. 
Jack C. Whittier is research and extension director for University of Nebraska-Lincoln Panhandle Research and Extension Center. George Seidel is with Colorado State University’s Beef Management Systems.
- Jason Ahola
- Assistant Professor – Beef Production Systems
- Colorado State University
