How Much Does it Cost to Keep a Cow?

This blog was a sponsored post written and first posted by Chelsey at OhThat'sChelsey.com in August 2024. Read more here.

How much does it cost to keep a cow?

Well it depends. On a lot. But we'll start with the easy math.

Summering Cows 

To keep it simple and fair, I figure based on the cow herd as a whole average rather than each individual pasture.

Fixed Costs -- Regardless of the number of cows we have, we can anticipate what these costs will be. 

Pasture -- We take all of our pasture payments (rent + land payment, including land tax) and divide by the number of cows to get a cost per cow. 

Mineral + Salt -- While this number will fluctuate with our cow numbers, we can estimate what our daily intakes will be. 

Variable Costs

Fencing

Treatment

Repairs to water infrastructure, approaches, or anything else random that inevitably costs money somewhere.

Breeding Cows

Bulls

AI

Ultrasounding + Processing

Processing + Pharmaceuticals

Wintering Cows

Feed -- This used to be the hardest to track. We keep our bunks full and stay ahead of the cows with feed, meaning we adjusted how much we were feeding daily based on the weather. Which made it difficult to keep up with our actual fed values versus our projected numbers. Now we feed with the iPad using the Performance Beef system. The iPad connects with scale cells via bluetooth to weigh each ingredient we load then also tracks how many pounds we feed to each pen. The user experience in the cab is ridiculously easy compared to how we used to do it with a paper, pen and doing mental math on the go. Then we're able to do closeouts and run reports without any additional data entry. Our feed logs are continuously kept up to date as we feed!

Bedding -- Also tracking all our bales used as bedding through the Performance Beef system.

Machine Usage -- Last year, an operation not too far from us talked about how they transitioned to calving on grass in May. Part of the reason was the cost. They figure the tractor + bale buster costs $75/hour to run while they feed and bed with it. I've been thinking about this since! While I'd like to attach actual figures of oil, oil filters, tires, etc to machines, we use them for other ventures on the place so allocating costs that way is difficult. I like the method of choosing a dollar per hour figure -- which will be manageable because during the winter the tractors, payloader, and rangers are used more for cattle than anything else. The only tricky part, for us, is allocating it to either the cow/calf venture or the feedlot. While my main goal is to capture accurate figures it cannot come at the expense of our efficiency; it simply isn't worth focusing so much on the little details of following each dollar that we're spending more time than it's worth on calculating. With that said, I have this haunting thought that if we truly accounted for the cost of our Ranger fleet it would be a giant hit on our cow/calf bottom line...

Equipment like the bale buster and feed wagon, that only get used for cattle, I'd really love to expense them per year, but we never know what the salvage value will be or how long we'll have them.

Treatment

Water

Yardage -- infrastructure upkeep, manure management

Main Objective

Our end goal is individual management. Find the medium frame sized cows that wean a calf over 50% of their own bodyweight and weed out the mamas that can't raise a calf that hits that target. For now, we're culling on individual stats and tracking profit as a herd.

We're also focusing on managing our costs. It's easy to invest without seeing a return and we want to see a positive return on investment.

You'll notice I didn't include labor. I think this is a great point for discussion. I've heard it said that our efforts are part of the deal and that's how we earn the money we make. On the flip side, there are needier cows than others and higher maintenance management practices that can easily flip the script from profitability to losing money. Personally, I think if we accurately accounted for our labor input, we would change many aspects of raising cattle. I think if we saw how much time we put in, we would see our ROI differently -- we'd continue investing in lower maintenance heifers, add more technology to automate every task we could, and continue to cull hard.