The hot dry weather across the Southern Plains and much of the Midwest certainly creates a hardship for commercial cow calf operations that are short of standing and stored forage. Water supplies also are limited in some areas. It is difficult to see a silver-lining to this "lack of clouds". However, some producers are using this as an opportunity to tighten the management and improve the genetic standards in their cow herd. Culling must be more rigorous in this situation than in most years. Therefore, this is an uninvited opportunity to identify marginal cows and remove them from the herd.

Visit with your local veterinarian and schedule a date to have the females in the herd pregnancy checked. Ask the veterinarian to not only tell which cows are "open" and which are bred, but to also identify those cows that are "late bred". These are the cows that extend the calving season and because their calves are younger, they usually are lighter weight at sale time. Culling the late calving pregnant cows as well as any "open" cows will leave a herd that is very uniform in the calving date next year. Even though smaller in number, they can become the core of a much more tightly managed group of cows. These cows will breed and calve in 60 days or less and produce a more uniform calf crop in the future. As replacement heifers are brought back into the herd to replace the culls, it will be easier to time their breeding and calving to match the core group of mature cows that survived the drought.

Also you may wish to sell cows that consistently producing calves in the lower 1/3 of the calf crop for weaning weight. If you are involved in one of the vertically integrated programs that puts emphasis on carcass merit, culling cows that have produced lower yielding or lower quality feedlot progeny, makes some sense at this time. These poorer producing cows are lower in profitability in good years, but now become a liability when forages are limited. Removing these inferior genetics from the herd this year, will allow for improvement in the entire productivity of the herd, if they are replaced with better heifers when herd expansion is more feasible.