Fall Calving and Herd Health

This week, Shaye interviews Dr. Robin Faulkner, a veterinarian with decades of beef industry experience, about fall calving systems and herd health. Faulkner outlines why fall calving can add value by spreading calf supply to better match year-round packing capacity and by producing more mature fall-born bulls, while noting location-specific challenges.

He emphasizes aligning calving with weather “thermal neutral” windows to reduce stress, disease risk, and negative fetal programming, and highlights nutrition as the key constraint for rebreeding when forage quality declines into winter. He advocates proactive, season-ahead management: forage testing, equipment readiness, calving kits, and facility preparation. On vaccines, he stresses tailoring protocols to handling and marketing constraints, using vaccination and weaning to improve marketability, and timing products to their effective protection windows, including pre-calving scour vaccines for colostrum immunity.

He discusses fall fly pressure and timing fly control to vulnerability periods, and urges responsible treatment and stewardship of insecticides, dewormers, and antibiotics to preserve efficacy.

Learn more at https://farmanimal.elanco.com/us/beef

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Catch more conversations like this one and learn more at https://www.casualcattleconversations.com/

00:00 Fall Calving Kickoff

01:18 Meet Dr. Faulkner

03:15 Why Calve in Fall

06:06 Weather Stress Window

09:50 Nutrition and Rebreeding