Information collected through the Western Canadian Cow-Calf Survey is starting to come out.

The latest survey was based on data from 260 participants across the Prairies, with herd sizes ranging from 20 to 1500 head.

Kathy Larson, the Acting Director for the Livestock and Forage Centre of Excellence at Clavet, says they had some interesting results.

“We’re seeing an increased uptake of using pain medication when dehorning and castrating, but also strong use of Polled Genetics. Which was a new question for us this time around? We’re still seeing really strong use of field feeding. That seems to be a very widely adopted practice. So, it will be interesting to see what happens across all the other surveys when we compile all the results from across Canada.”

Similar surveys were conducted in Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

Larson says the Western Canadian Survey had about 50 questions and started out by asking producers what they did for the 2016 breeding season.

“How many cows you turned out for exposure to breeding? How many Bulls did you use? When was your calving start date? When was your breeding season start date?   Some very basic production questions, then we start getting into what do you do for practices on your operation? What types of winter feeding do you do? There was even a question on cost of production, asking them to provide expense data. So that we can have a sense of if you follow certain practices is it tied to profitability?”

She says “Some of that data is still being evaluated and will be released at a later date. She says they want to divide up the information by provinces, herd size, and compare some of the key indicators that would drive whether or not a practice is adopted.   So, we want to look at does the age of a producer have an influence on whether a certain practice is being adopted? Does herd size, does reliance on farm income from the sale of beef cattle?   There’s research on this being done elsewhere but not with our Western Canadian data set.”

Larson says the information from the survey gives producers an opportunity to compare their practices to the benchmark in the survey and to use it as a checkpoint when evaluating their own operation.

Once the data evaluation is completed the information will be available online as www.wcccs.ca.