Winter and cows

Teton Valley veterinarian Todd Tibbetts talks about your cows and winter cold. David Sparks, Idaho Egg. Speaker2: Today, cows have a certain ability to withstand cold climates. In the fall, they start to put on a long hair coat, and as long as they have good nutrition, they put on a good reserve of body fat that insulates their body if it's really cold and really windy. Cows need a place to get out of the way in some kind of cover, like down in these cottonwood trees would be a good place for cows to go natural. Like a willow patch is a long stream. Banks are good windbreaks for cows. There's a way to build slotted fences. You don't want to block the wind completely. You want some air movement through there. But kind of the rule of thumb is 80% solid, 20% open meaning. So a slab of wood, a little bit of space, slab of wood, and that lets some airflow through there, but it'll decrease the velocity of wind for about 300 feet past that wind block based on like an 8 to 10 foot high fence. So a lot of guys do it that way. A rancher in Oregon that I did some work for, he went out and saw some sagebrush and baled it into 4x4 by eight foot bales and then stack that up for windbreak. And of course, the cows wouldn't eat the sagebrush. So it was an awesome windbreak. And I thought that was thinking outside the box. So normally, let's say at 30 or 40 degrees, a cow can get by with being fed about two and one half percent of their body weight in an ass fed ration, meaning most beef cows are somewhere between 2000 £204,100. So that calculates out to about 30, £35 a day. Speaker1: Love the sagebrush bales.