The Importance of Preconditioning

With California Ag Today, I’m Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

Well I’ve got a story for you today that I think is just fascinating if you’re in the cattle business. We all have so many decisions about when we calve and how we feed and what inputs we spend the money on and, with some analysis on that coming from Superior Livestock Auction data as analyzed by Merch Animal Health and Kansas State University is Dr. John Hutcheson, director of cattle technical services at Merck.

I’ll be sharing some of Dr. Hutcheson’s insights over the next few days because there is a lot of it, but we’ve got to start somewhere, right? All of this is going to be based around the golden question of what prompts cattle buyers to pay more money for your calves.

Today, preconditioning…

“It's a big deal. You know, our cattle system is set up for calves to move off the ranch and transition into a grazing situation, backgrounding situation, or feedlot situation. And so, they want these calves ready for that next transition. And so if you look at Back 45, which was the most popular program that a lot of cow-calf producers participated in, it added almost 45 bucks a head, almost $8 per hundredweight is what these calves got in terms of value.”

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about horns, frames, and genetics. After that, implants.

We’ll discuss it all right here in the days to come on the Ag Information Network.