Managing the nutrition of your cow herd is an important key to a profitable cow-calf operation. Feed costs represent the largest input in any operation, and proper nutrition is essential to reproductive success, which greatly affects revenue potential.

Cow-calf producers often focus on weaning weights and calf prices. I’m not going to tell you weaning weight isn’t important, and I realize we make more money when calf prices are high, but I challenge you to really think about the nutritional management of your herd.

A solid foundation

Nutrition is one of the most studied disciplines in the beef industry for good reason. However, before we dive into specifics about cow-calf nutrition, let’s review some fundamentals. We can simplify it down to understanding animal requirements and developing nutritional strategies (grazing, grazing with supplementation, or feeding) to meet those requirements.

Beef cows experience their greatest requirement from calving to breeding. That’s also the time when the consequences of not meeting requirements (open cows) will likely be the most detrimental.

Requirements remain relatively high, but gradually decline, from breeding through weaning. The cow’s lowest requirement of the year is from weaning until about 60 days before calving.

The majority of fetal growth occurs in the final weeks of gestation. Thus, requirements start to increase again as the cow approaches calving.

Cow size and milk production have tremendous influence on requirements, and there is no question that both (especially milk) have continued to increase. What does this mean? It means that many of the nation’s cow herds have greater nutritional requirements today than they did 20, or even 10, years ago.

It may seem simple, but it is critical to know what your cows weigh and what level of milk production your herd has if you are going to determine their requirements.

The whole herd

One of the challenges of practical cow nutrition is that we do not manage individuals; we manage groups. The larger your operation is, the more feasible it may be to have multiple management groups.

Herds that have a tight calving window are able to more effectively manage and meet the nutritional requirements of the majority of the animals in the group.

It should be obvious that if you had all ages of cows and all stages of production in one management group, it would be impossible to perfectly meet each cow’s requirement. Instead, you would likely have cows that would have their requirements exceeded (wasting money), and you would have cows that were being underfed (increased risk of reproductive failure).

One of the most basic approaches to minimizing the number of management groups required by an operation is to reduce the length of the breeding season (and thus calving season). Herds that have a tight calving window are able to more effectively manage and meet the nutritional requirements of the majority of the animals in the group.

There are many good resources available to help you determine the requirements of your cows. Remember, the accuracy of the resource in predicting requirements will be only as good as the accuracy of the inputs you provide (stage of production, cow weight, milk production, etc.).

Input options

Once we have a handle on what the cow’s requirements are, we need to develop a strategy to meet those requirements. For the majority of cow-calf operations, these needs are going to be met by grazing for a significant part of the year. Most cow-calf operations choose to calve in the spring so that the time of greatest requirement aligns with the time of greatest forage availability or quality. When cows can’t graze, we rely on stored forages such as hay, corn silage, crop residue, etc.

When necessary, forages need to be supplemented to meet energy or protein requirements. Many options exist, ranging from commercial supplements to a variety of coproducts depending on your location.

If you ask an extension educator or nutritionist to help you devise a supplementation strategy or develop a total mixed ration (TMR), I can about guarantee the first step is going to be to analyze your forages and feedstuffs. It is impossible to know what you need to supplement if you don’t know what your base forage is providing. This is true for grazing or feeding in a drylot.

Bring it together

It is pretty simple. Know the cow’s requirements and develop a plan to meet her needs. How do we know if it is working? This is where a little cowboy common sense comes in. It is impossible to match requirements of every cow every day. Cows can handle short periods of slight overfeeding and underfeeding. They simply gain body condition or mobilize body condition when intake doesn’t match requirements.

We should always be monitoring the body condition score (BCS) of our cows. If cows are maintaining a consistent BCS, we have achieved our goal of providing the proper nutrition to meet the cow’s nutritional requirements.

Editor’s note: “The Digestive Tract” is a regular column focused on nutrition for the beef cattle life cycle. Dan Shike is professor and interim head of the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois.