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Caroline Wingert Research Update, Co-Mingling Bulls, Bull-to-Cow Ratio
00:24:23
This week on Cattle Chat, our guest Caroline Wingert shares her research on jobs in rural communities and the challenges that come with living in rural areas. The experts also dive into a listener’s question of co-mingling bulls,
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Cattle chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here in the studio. Morning, Dustin. Good morning, Scott.
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C
Morning, guys.
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B
Bob.
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A
Hello, everybody.
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D
Philip.
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E
Good morning, Kansas.
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A
All right, we're ready to go.
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B
Been working on his intro.
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C
I saw him practicing in the hallway last.
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B
And we've also got one of our students here today, Caroline Wingert. So we're happy to have Caroline with us. Morning, Caroline.
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F
Morning.
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B
So Caroline is joining us and she is working on her master's program. We're going to get to hear a little bit about her and her research this morning. We'll also talk a little bit about housing bull through the winter. And then we've got a few other topics that we'll address. Before we get into those, we always appreciate. If you have a listener question or a topic you'd like us to discuss, you can send that to us at bciksu. Edu or you can reach out to us on Facebook. Before we get into our topics today, as you guys know, we're right in the heart of football season, so you probably can guess what my question is going to be today. But as you're watching football, you by nature have to watch commercials. And one of my favorite, and it's been around for a while, but one of the ones I think is funny is the horror movie mock up where they go, well, should we just get in the running car? No, let's go hide behind those chainsaws in the room over there. And it's about not making good decisions. Which commercial do you think is the funniest? What have you seen recently that you think is a funny commercial?
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A
So can. Can I act like an old guy?
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B
Yeah.
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A
I haven't made good funny commercials in years. You got to go back to the. Some of the old Budweiser commercials were hilarious with the frogs and everything. But no, there's no. There's no new funny.
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D
No.
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B
No new funny.
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A
Not anymore.
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E
I'm stuck. Yeah. I cannot think of a single, like, funny commercial here in the last.
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D
Yeah, that was my. I was going to agree with Bob. I guess I'm getting old, too.
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A
You know, for some reason this game. Remember the old Motel 6 commercials with Bob Beaudet.
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B
Tom Baudette.
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A
Tom Beaudet.
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C
There you go. You leave the light on for you.
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A
Yeah, they weren't necessarily funny, but.
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B
But they're memorable.
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A
But they're memorable. I can remember everything, but he's.
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E
Maybe that's the problem. There's no new commercials that are very memorable. I'm not sure Stick in your head.
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C
So there was one. This is an older one, too, but there's a guy sitting on a porch in the swamp, like a little cabin in the swamp, eating pizza, and put Tabasco on the pizza. A mosquito lands on his arm, and he just keeps eating, and then it flies off, goes behind a tree, and then there's this big explosion back there. And that one has stuck with me since probably like 1994.
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A
That's a good one. Yeah, I do remember that one.
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B
Caroline, do you have one?
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F
I don't have time for commercials.
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A
She's a busy woman in school.
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B
So you've got some research. So tell us a little bit about you.
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F
Yeah, so I'm originally from Ottawa, Kansas, where I grew up showing cattle. And we have a small cattle herd of our own still, and came to K State, did an ag econ major, and then got caught up with the bci.
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B
Yeah. So your. Your interest now that you're doing research in, and so you started working for us as you were before you graduated from undergrad and worked with Dr. Gunderson a lot on some of the areas of rural practice. What kind of drove your interest in that area?
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F
I'm originally from a rural area, and I think that that's kind of the backbone of America. And I feel like if you neglect the rural areas, then it just leaves us open to bigger issues.
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D
Yeah.
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B
And you and I have talked. A lot of your research is focused on rural veterinarians, but many of the challenges that they face are shared among other rural professionals, where, whether it's dentists or lawyers or even anybody going into a rural community. And some of those challenges. So one of your first steps was you wanted to identify what are some of those factors that lead people to stay or not stay. So tell us how you approach that.
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F
Absolutely. So we developed a survey, and in order to do that, we probably spent months talking about what we hypothesized as factors. And then we talked to people in the industry, we talked to rural veterinarians, we talked to people here in the BCI and in the vet school, and we pitched it and had a lot of different ideas, and then kind of had to go down the process of narrowing down what we thought was the most important or going to be the most significant.
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D
Yeah.
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B
And so you ended up crafting a survey that you put out, and you're now analyzing some of the results from that. And it's hard to figure out what are the success metrics, but you kind of focused in three broad categories. Tell us a little Bit about that for sure.
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F
So we kind of decided that the way we were going to measure success is the first one being longevity. So if they were able to stay in their rural practice for more or less than five years and kind of what impacted that? The second one being career satisfaction. So we looked at burnout levels, we looked at if they'd recommend it, if they would do it again, those sorts of things. And then the final one would be financial success. And we, we tried to account for as much as possible with that, with owning a home, having rent, having mortgage or paying off loans and that sort of thing along with salaries, for finances.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I think those are good success metrics. As you think about the future of rural practice and going in there, Dustin, what are, what are your thoughts on some of the rural professionals and staying in place and what are some of the drivers that you've seen?
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D
So yeah, there's, I'm trying to think. I've seen some research that's looked at the rural communities and I think agriculture like one drives the other, but actually it's reversed. Like we've always thought that in order to have a rural, let's say community businesses, you need to have agriculture like strong ag. But I think so this recent research has actually shown that it's the opposite that you need, but regardless you still need. I think in rural settings, both the ag and you need those, you know, the, the, the, the rural shops that, but I don't know that I have a, an answer.
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B
Yeah, but you have to have to have that support structure in place. But I think what Caroline is looking at is some of the things with the individual people and Scott, you spent time in, in R are some of the things that you observed that made you want to stay or that may have been challenges.
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C
It was more lifestyle type stuff for me. And it was, you know, it was very different from when I first graduated when I, you know, I was, I got married in vet school. But we didn't start having kids till we were in practice.
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A
Right.
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C
Until I was in practice. And when you start having kids, some of those things like distance to sporting events, like my kids would have had to drive an hour to go play soccer somewhere. Where, where I grew up, we had soccer in town. You know, not the end all be all, but some of those things have distance to amenities, you know, retail shops. It seems like struggle in those rural communities, more service based options. Those, those things kind of flourish. Your diesel shops, tire repair, things like that. And it was, it was the lifestyle stuff for us that ultimately ended my.
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A
Tenure in real practice.
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B
And you, you, Caroline, you worked with Iowa State and Todd Gunderson, you guys crafted this survey and you asked some questions that will get at the things that Scott was talking about, right?
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F
Yeah, for sure. So we looked at how do we want to define rural? Because I think there's a lot of different ways you can define rural. So we looked at those sorts of things and we looked at, you know, is there a big resource extraction that your community is reliant on? And we looked at do you have family in a reasonable distance, so can you travel to and from the family in the same day? And we, we thought about asking how close are you to the nearest Walmart or Target? Because that's what a lot of people rely on as rural or not. But that didn't make it in the survey.
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D
Yeah.
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B
And I think it's interesting as you start putting some of those pieces together because Dustin brought up a really good point of there's no clear definition of what's rural and what drives that success or not. So it'll be, as you find out, results from your survey. We'll look forward to sharing that. What were the, some of the early surprises that you had as you put this survey out or started to look at some of the initial data you got back? Did you have any?
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F
Well, I think, I don't know if I was necessarily surprised by anything. I was really just fascinated. We spent so much time making the survey, talking about it, strategizing, planning for it, and then finally the survey came to a close. And I think I was just excited to be able to get my hands into the data and start getting, trying to get results and that sort of.
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B
Thing, trying to figure it out. And it's never easy when you're putting together survey data because you're trying to figure out what people think on this topic or how they feel and then come up with something useful that they can use to be productive and successful going down the road. So excellent job and we look forward to getting the results. We'll have you back when we have your survey results more put together. Next. Next question. And this comes from a listener and it's about co housing bulls and which is always a challenge. And we've talked about managing bulls, keep them with the cows or not. But if you have multiple bulls, one of their thoughts was should I put together bulls that are similar size that may end up fighting, or should I put together maybe a big bull and a little bull if I'm going to house them, or should I put together a bunch of bulls in one area. And what's the. I want the least fighting and would like to get you guys opinion on how I can achieve that.
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A
I. I actually really like this question that the listener was basically kind of challenging some of the advice that she's received, which. The advice she's received as far as housing bulls together is house bulls that are about the same age, same size, so that an. A larger older bull doesn't dominate a younger bull. And she kind of asked the question or flipped it on its head and said, wouldn't it make more sense to put an old bull and a young bull together because they won't fight, because the young bull will know his place in the hierarchy, whereas if he puts two similarly sized bulls, they're gonna have to fight to figure out what the hierarchy is. And I think she's got a good point there. The real answer is, I don't think we know enough about bull behavior. And because I think what she's really driving at is any of us that have had bulls, and then at some point or another, you have bulls that fight and one of them gets pretty darn injured. And it's like, I'd like to avoid that in the future. What could I do from a housing or grouping standpoint to. To eliminate that risk? I'm not sure we still. I'm not sure we know yet some of the things that I think are really important. And actually this listener talked about her strategies, which is plenty of space, lots of space, especially feed and water. Don't make pinch points where bulls are likely to come together when they're wanting to have a fight, such as around food or water. So plenty of space. And I think that's what I see problems is, you know, pen and housing designs. And I'm thinking of the time of the year when the bulls aren't out on the breeding pasture. So the when. When we're trying to house them somewhere, sometimes we scrimp a little bit and don't give. And they're big animals and they do fight. And so I think however big you think the pen ought to be, make it even bigger. Spread out the food, spread out the water. You know, way bigger than typical recommendations for feedlot cattle or even cows, I think. So I don't know the answer how to prevent all fights, but I think there's some things we can do housing wise, to at least make getting into contact with each other less likely.
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E
Well, what about housing them individually? I mean, and obviously that could be a problem if you got lots of bulls. But if I've only got two or three, having two or three small paddocks where they're separated, and maybe I can avoid fighting for the most part that way, especially if I can put a pretty solid fence between those three paddocks or there's they're separated by some kind of distance or something, I could, I could avoid that. I do. Like you said, I kind of agree with her point that you put a yearling bull and a mature bull together, they're probably not going to fight much because they mismatched. They're so. Yeah, they're so mismatched. I, I mean, I've just seen guys drop, you know, put all of them together in one pasture and you just let them go at it till they figure out the hierarchy. But what's the difference between doing that in the off season and how do you handle it during the breeding season as far as matching up bulls?
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A
I think that's another good question. And we've done a little bit of work looking at bull behavior, but just enough to ask more questions in that you certainly see some dominance hierarchy. But what we found was in, in one of the bulls studies that we did, there were only two bulls in there, and there was obviously a dominant bull and a submissive bull. And from a fighting standpoint, from just a behavior standpoint, that submissive bull stayed away from the dominant bull and the dominant bull was around the cows in heat. And you'd think that's the end of the story. But actually, this submissive bull had pretty good libido. He wanted to mate the cows. And so what, he, he just snuck in and, and he bred. Actually, we got just as many matings from the submissive bull as we did in the dominant bull. He just did it in a way that wasn't dominant. And so he would, you know, when the dominant bull was busy with one cow, he would find another cow and heat. And so what I learned from that whole experiment was it's more complicated than I thought.
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B
And we can't, we can't tell just.
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A
By five minutes watching right now. One of the things that led us to that research is there's been a number of studies that show, you know, so in a five bull pasture, something like that, multiple bull pasture, one or two bulls are going to breed two thirds of the cows and then the other three bulls will breed the other third of the cows. And, and some bulls may not breed any cows. Is that libido or sex drive? Is it dominance? And those are two Separate traits. Like in this, the case I showed the submissive bull actually had the strong sex drive. He just lost fights. And so those are two different traits, I think. Again, so more than anything, what I learned is we don't know very much. We know that bulls don't all breed the same number of cows and they, they don't do. What I would like is the bull that I want to breed the most cows, he's not necessarily the one that does. And so size of the mating group, you know, and size of the bull battery, those are questions that need further work.
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E
We just don't understand very well why bulls breed different numbers of cows. We think we use dominance, but that's not necessarily the case in all situations.
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A
That's exactly right. So we, we throw around the terms like libido or sex drive and dominance. And what I would say is obviously those must have some effect, but it's not really clear exactly how that all comes out into the number of cows that are bred. And then you add fertility to that. So the most dominant bull may not be the most fertile bull. And so with really start figuring out who sires the most calves. I know at the end of the breeding season, if I do genomic testing or if I can tell from the calf by breeds or something, I don't know that even during the breeding season, which is quite frustrating for our industry. We probably need to know more about this.
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C
I'm thinking of a situation in practice where I had a producer turned out an older bull and a younger bull on 25 head of cows and the older bull got hurt or something happened, but he was still not letting the younger bull breed cows. And we ended up with like two cows bred out of 25 with two bulls in there. And so then you question, is it better to just leave one bull? So you don't have that situation and I don't know the answer to that.
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B
Yeah, I think that's a good question because as you tie in to number of bulls and. And which is a good topic for discussion, what is the right bull to cow ratio?
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D
Is it.
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B
Is it 1 to 25? Is it the, the yearling rule of thumb is one cow per month of age once they pass their BSE. Right, Bob?
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A
And as far as. I think that that's a pretty good starting place.
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B
And so what's it, what is it for mature bulls, for maturables?
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A
My personal preference is to get it as high as possible, as many cows as possible. For one thing, to keep my bull cost.
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B
What's that number you knew I was going to ask you.
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A
No, no, I'm going to say it and it'll probably 40. No, no, I'm going to say 35. I, I honestly think we ask bulls to not do as well as they, as they can because, you know, I think most typically it's people use 25 or 30. I think they can do more, but they, I think that it takes some continued observation. If I'm going to turn one bull per 35 cows and, and then again, it matters whether we're talking about single bull pasture or multiple bull pasture, I think I need to monitor pretty closely because I'm asking him to breed, you know, so say in the first 21 days of the breeding season when no one is pregnant yet. And so there's 35 cows out there. If I've got them all cycling within the first 21 days, he's breeding about one and a half cows a day. And I, I think bulls can do that. But if he's lame, if he's doesn't have much libido, if, you know, there's reasons why he wouldn't breed one and a half a day. So I need to get out there and have some way to kind of monitor that bull activity, which is easier said than done because some of the breeding takes place at night and, and those types of things. So I want as many cows per bull as I can afford, full as I can manage, because then also maybe I'll invest more in the, the bulls themselves and the time because now I'm a little bit scared that I don't want a, a problem to occur. So I'm going to spend some time watching to make sure that he is breeding one and a half cows.
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B
That's your, that's your risk management is you have to be able to observe because most of the things that go wrong with bulls are you can observe them visually.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So if he has a broken penis prepuce that's out or extended, he, if he can't walk, if he can't see, if he's got some big, I mean a lot of the, if he's past.
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A
His bse, a lot of things we can see now then. But I got to check it application. Yep. Because you know, and whether that's a, you know, a small producer or a really large producer, I've talked to some guys, you know, in large range country, when you're talking about, well, that would be guys on horses spending all day to go out in the pasture. And the interesting thing I can think of one Situation where that was the situation, large range type situations. And there were a couple of pastures that were close enough that they did have cowboys out checking quite frequently, and a couple pastures that they didn't see until the end of the grazing season. And they tended to see more bull problems in those pastures that they didn't observe because when they observed a problem, they did intervene and, you know, bring a bull out or do something different. And so we had this conversation of, well, in an ideal situation we would do that, but there's some pastures we're just not going to get to and it's understood well.
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B
And it's ways, different ways to manage risk, which we were actually talking about a little bit before we got on the podcast, was most. 85% of the turkeys that are sold in the US are sold between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is a large portion of the industry, which that 85% number actually matches up to on cow calf operations. About 85% of their income is sold from weaned calves.
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D
So.
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B
So, Dustin, what do, what do we do to manage that risk? Especially in years like this where our prices are really volatile and I want to sell them at the right time, not the wrong time. How do I manage that risk of feeder Castin?
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A
Tell us when the price is going to be the.
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F
Or.
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B
Yeah, if you just want to pick.
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D
A date and tell us price and.
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B
Yeah, enterprise.
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A
Yeah.
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D
So now your question is referring. We were talking about bulls and all of a sudden we started talking about turkeys. Well, I just wanted to go back and make a quick comment about. Bob's talking about some of those producers in large ranges. Right. That they don't see their cows or until, you know, it's at the end of the season, you know, But I think, I mean, that's managing that risk. The way I view that is it's an economic problem.
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C
Right.
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D
You get opportunity costs versus the benefits. And if you want don't have the time, you don't have the resources to check. I mean that's. I mean, it's pretty high costs, but then you got to offweigh that with the potential revenue losses later. And so I think they're making that decision whether they realize it or not. Anyway, now coming back to your feeder. Feeder calf question.
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A
That he let in with turkeys.
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D
Yeah. That he let in with turkeys might.
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C
Deserve a round of applause.
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B
So.
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D
Yeah, I mean, right. We've seen prices at record highs and it's probably going to be continued highs for quite some time. Right? Yeah.
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A
But I want to sell at the end, very highest.
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D
So I, I guess the question I always ask myself is the goal, is that the goal or is it, do you want to set some price that, okay, I know what my break even.
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A
Is and if I can be happy at that level and I can continue.
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D
On in the next year.
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A
Right.
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D
And so you, are you truly hedging or are you kind of trying to maybe more speculate?
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B
You should.
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E
I maybe should have a couple of different numbers in hit in your mind, okay, what's my break even? What's the reasonable amount of profit or what, What's a minimum amount of profit I would really like to make so I can kind of pay attention to market there. And then if I'm getting above that, then, you know, I'm at least, I may not be elated, but I'm satisfied.
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D
Yep. Or, and the other thought I was gonna say is instead of maybe locking everything 100% in, right. Of hedging marketing, when maybe you do 35 or half of it at break even so you know that you're going to have some and then the others, you try to maybe take a little more risk and try to speculate that way you can make a little more.
- [22:31]
A
Yeah, I, I agree. I think that you got to kind of know what your costs are. And it's kind of using a sports analogy, the baseball analogy of, of get your singles and doubles and, and yeah, I'd like to hit a home run, but if I consistently get, you know, where I'm, I'm moving the game forward, I'm moving the ranch forward, I'm hitting the, the income I need to keep the ranch into the next year. That's not a bad way to play the game. You know, that, that, in fact, using my baseball analogy, if you are always trying for home runs, those guys are also the ones that strike out a lot. And, and so keeping the ball in play.
- [23:12]
D
Yeah, I mean, you gotta also know what your risk level is too, in addition to knowing what your costs are. What, what is your risk? Because again, maybe those folks that are always trying to hit home runs, yeah, they do hit the home runs. They win some years, but then other years they do strike out. And maybe that's just their, that's just.
- [23:27]
B
The way they play the game, the way they operate.
- [23:29]
D
Yeah.
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A
Well, maybe it's like if you're a home run hitter, don't compare yourself to the guys that like small ball singles and doubles. And if opposite, don't compare yourself to that guy because it's, it's, you know, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. When, when somebody's hitting a home run, you're going, ah, I wish I was like that. And when you're consistently keeping the ball moving forward, the home runner here might go, man, I wish I was like that. It's like, know your strategy and be happy with it.
- [23:54]
B
I think, I think you're right. Framing it, setting your expectations, and then being happy with where you hit those is a, is a great way to view that. We appreciate you guys thoughts on several of these topics. And Caroline, appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for listening. And if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to discuss, you can send us an email at bcisu Eduardo.