"If a cow has issues nursing her calf then it’s up to Elizabeth Wonnenberg (pictured here) and her sister Lydia to take over, bottle feeding the calf several times a day on their family’s farm near Dallas."
CREDIT: Courtesy Photo
Calving season is underway across South Dakota. Night checks mean little sleep for cattle producers, but they still say it’s their favorite time of year.
At 44, George Kenzy says he never gets tired of welcoming the next generation of calves onto the family’s Gregory farm.
“Oh, I love it. It’s probably one of the bigger highlights of the year, especially now that we hit some nice weather. Just seeing the new life created.”
Most cattle producers will agree when Mother Nature cooperates, it makes for an easier calving season, because calving is intense enough without uncooperative weather, explains fourth generation Dallas cattleman, Hank Wonnenberg.
“Calving season is all the days and nights run together. You wake up in the morning after maybe a few hours of sleep, typically not all that restful because you’re up off and on all throughout the night, but you wake up and go out and you look for any new calves. … if you find something you want to make sure they look ok, that they are not chilled. You wanna see if there’s signs that the cow looks like she’s already been sucked. If the cow hasn’t been sucked, then you need to really monitor the situation.”
If a cow has issues nursing her calf, Wonnenberg’s wife, Melissa and their daughters, Elizabeth and Lydia take over bottle feeding the calf several times a day.
“It’s just been part of their life. We get up and get ready for school and Lydia heads out the door for school. She’s just turned 8. Then Elizabeth stays home with me and we go out and we bottle feed the calves. We have only one calf right now, which is kinda nice. Then she takes care of her other chores. She takes care of her chickens and rabbits.”
Growing up on a dairy farm, Melissa says everything she knows about bottle feeding calves she learned from her parents. Hank can relate. Because he grew up checking cows with his dad, Steve, he knows what signs to watch out for if a cow or heifer is having trouble and needs assistance, or a calf needs some TLC after its born.
Heifers are the bovines which require the most monitoring during calving season, explains George Kenzy.
“Those first-time calvers do not realize what’s going on, and they might not push as well to get that calf out. So, it’s kind of a fine line of management on letting that heifer go quite a while, because it ultimately is best if they can just do it on their own. But you definitely wait too long and put too much stress on the cow and the newborn calf. So, you kinda have to, just through experience and gut feeling, know when to intervene.”
Because heifers need more attention than experienced cows, many producers plan breeding season so the heifers calve at a different time than the cows in their herd. There’s a lot of other strategies farmers and ranchers implement to make calving season run smooth – timing feedings to get cows to calve at a certain time of day, walking through the herd throughout the year during feeding to keep them familiar with humans, placing cameras in the calving barn to monitor remotely and reduce stress from human checks.
The element these cattle producers have no control over is the markets they will sell these calves into. And right now, although calving season on her Keldron ranch is going well, Danni Beer says the markets concern her.
“To be honest, I have a lot of concern for the cattle market situation. I feel like the feedyard segment of our industry is in a really tight spot right now…there’s a real gap for price discovery.”
The gap Beer references is the difference between the low-price producers receive from processors for the cattle they raise, compared to the prices grocery stores pay the processors. This disparity also frustrates George Kenzy.
“Of course I can’t beat Mother Nature, but I can do a lot to protect my livelihood out here by how I manage my livestock. But when you get into the political issues that are going on and there are so many people trying to tell you what’s best for your markets, when it has not been working for several years now with our high box beef prices and historically low fed cattle prices, it’s pretty frustrating and overwhelming.”
Kenzy puts his frustration into action advocating for policy, like reinstating Country of Origin Labeling, that he believes will help cattle producers receive a fair price for the calves they welcome into the world each spring.