Tricks of The Trade

The photo shows the evening meal at Pinhook farm. One of the unique and labor saving traits of cows is that if you feed them at dusk the majority of them will calve in the daytime. Through natural selection many wild creatures adapt strategies that improve the odds for their young. Bison will not calve in a blizzard and llama's, at least in the Andes, only give birth in the daytime because there tongues are too small to lick off their babies. The baby llamas can survive with the warmth of the sun but would perish if born in the cold of night. Cows, however, have been domesticated and they need our help. There is no known reason why feeding cows at night makes them calve in the daytime, but it works and is backed by an ISU study of 1,331 cows on 15 Iowa farms. Fed one time daily at dusk, 85% of the calves were born between 6 am and 6 pm, verses control groups that were fed at 9 am and 3 pm. Only 38.4% of the control group calved in the daytime. We only use this practice with the first calf heifers. I do still get up and check them at night (it's the cowboys code). This simple management trick has been a great benifit to man and beast alike.