 Hi, I'm Carl Hoppe, extension livestock specialist here at the Carrington Research Extension Center, part of North Dakota State University Extension. Today's topic is dealing with cows that lost their calves during a blizzard or a winter storm or doodamud or whatever precipitation event or other issues that happen when a cow loses their calf. Specifically, we're going to be talking about first calf cows or first calf heifers, some people would say. So what do we do with this heifer that is not going to raise a calf this year? First thing is to consider if we keep around, it's going to cost us a whole year's worth of feed that we could put into a bred heifer, a young heifer, if we decide to keep them around. However, a young heifer we may not have had the opportunity to keep extras around this year. So we didn't plan on having cows lose extra calves. So we just don't have a pool of heifers and that genetics to come from. So we might want to keep this cow that just lost her calf around on the cover just because the genetics that you've been looking for, she meant the goal to keep. It's pretty hard to go out and source those genetics from somebody else that you have. So we'll be able to do that. The other thing is we can let this heifer grow for a year. In other words, many years ago, we used to calf out cows or heifers at three years of age with their first calf. Now we routinely do it at two years of age. Why did they do three years? They give them time to grow, develop, get a little bit more mature. Cows are still growing. Cows are still growing up to four to five years of age. So letting them grow up to three years of age allowed them to compete better, to produce a calf with the cow herd and be part of the cow herd. So if we're calving out heifers, we treat them a little special, give them extra care, maybe their own pastures just so they don't have to compete with the cow herd. But if we let them get older, then they can compete quite nicely. She'll usually breed back quicker than one that's lactating because she doesn't have nutritional demand on the calf. So the other thing is, if she's a little bit thin, if we give her a year off, she can recondition herself and put some body condition back on. That'll be good benefit for her over her lifetime then. However, I always have to say it seems like once a cow loses a calf, the likelihood of you losing another calf somewhere down the line two, three, four years from now seems to be higher than other cows. So keep that in mind when you're looking at keeping back these replacements. Now, if you're going to sell the heifer, first thing you need to consider is she's getting up towards that maturity issue where she turns into not a young animal, but an older mature B category type carcass. So with that in mind, we need to be careful that we don't overextend the days on feed for a heifer like that if we decide to feed it. Perhaps we can sell them just as is. The problem is we end up with what's called the heifer market, the heifer at market. Heifer at market is a little bit better than the cow market, but it's not as well as the fed cattle market. So our option here is to feed the heifer for a period of time, 30, 40, 60, 80, 90, maybe even 120 or 150 days on feed, depending upon how thin she is, to put some weight on to her so she gets a better carcass. Problem is if we do five months, that'll probably reach the bone. She probably needs to be three months and hopefully she's in good enough condition to make that work if she isn't. Now we have to figure out whether it's the cost-benefit ratio to go ahead and do that or just take her what you get, take her to the market and see what you get. With that, we really do have two choices with our cow herd. One is to keep her around, put the dollars into her for feed for another year or sell her, or I guess there is a third option. That would be to keep the cow and try to put weight into her, even though we have corn that costs seven, eight dollars a bushel, try to put some weight on to her. This isn't just let her heal up a little bit. This is put some fat and condition. So now we have white tablecloth type, choice type meat that can come out of that carcass and go that direction.