Calving season is here. Across cow country, green grass is pushing through, and newborn calves are bouncing next to their mothers. There’s a familiar energy on the ranch: part excitement, part chaos, and part sleep deprivation.
Here’s a question worth sitting with: Who’s doing the calving on your ranch? Is it you, or your cows?
As a company, RMC has worked with hundreds of ranchers across wildly different environments and climates and we have revealed a consistent pattern. That it has almost nothing to do with geography, breed, or grass type. On some ranches, the people do the calving. On others, the cows do the calving. The difference in how those two ranching businesses experience the next six weeks couldn’t be more dramatic.
On ranches where people do the calving, the season becomes all-consuming. When you run into that rancher at the vet supply store, you’ll recognize them immediately: hollow-eyed, moving fast, and leaving with their hair on fire. On ranches where cows do the calving, it’s just another season. Things still go wrong, they always do, but most days are run at a manageable pace.
So why does one operation require two people working full-time to calve 150 cows, while another operation has one person looking after 400 calving cows with energy to spare?
The honest answer is rarely the comfortable one: the system was designed (intentionally or not) to produce exactly those results.
Maybe you designed your system. But more likely, for many, you inherited it. It worked for the previous generation, it made sense in a different era with different economics and different labor, and it has quietly persisted through sheer momentum. Nobody ever sat down and asked, “Is this actually the best way?”
Left to their own devices, people add complexity to simple processes. It’s human nature. We intervene because we’re anxious. We check because we’re worried. We pull calves because we’re there and it feels like helping. The cow that would have calved fine in another twenty minutes now got our “help” and we feel needed.
Tom Lasater said it plainly: “The cattle business is a really simple business. The complicated part is keeping it simple.”
When this calving season wraps up, before the exhaustion fades and life gets busy again, hold a debrief. Even if the crew is just you and the dog. Ask yourself a few hard questions:
- Why is calving season this stressful?
- What specific things did I do that the cow could have done herself?
- What did my interventions actually cost: in time, in labor, in long-term genetics, etc.?
- What would it take to design a calving season that doesn’t end in exhaustion?
Remember your current system is giving you exactly the results it was designed to give. The question is whether you designed it, or whether it designed itself.
The good news: cows are remarkably capable when we let them be. Their biology has been working for a long time without our help. Our job is to set the conditions: the right genetics, the right timing, the right nutrition, and most importantly the right management mindset.
That’s not laziness. That’s management.
As with most things in natural systems, maximum is not optimum. Live calves per cow is no exception. Here Dave Pratt explains the concept as related to conception rate.
Happy calving!
