January 21, 2000

Jack Horne of Valera, who runs 350 head of mother cows in Coleman County, says producers adopting the Standardized Performance Analysis (SPA) system for evaluating their operations may be in for a surprise.

"Your first year is really an eye-opener," says Horne, who was introduced to SPA by Dr. Jim McGrann about seven years ago. "You find out what your production costs are. And you really don’t wean the pounds of calves per cow that you think you are, until you do this program. It goes by when you put your bulls out with a set of cows. You start with that number rather than what you finish up with. You might wean a 600-pound calf, but when you take that back to the first number of cows you put your bull with a year-and-a-half earlier, you get down to 450 pounds per cow. Most people don’t look at it that way."

The Coleman County cattleman says his weaning weights have improved considerably from his first year in the program. That’s because SPA helps a producer identify areas of weakness to make needed changes.

"For example, if you’re losing a lot of calves from the time you put the bull out until you palpate for pregnancy, or until the time that you wean the calves, you’ll see where you’re losing those calves and look and see if you might have a disease in your herd. Then you work on vaccines. Or, if you’re losing a lot of calves at birth, you may want to look at the frame size of your bull, or your nutrition on cows. Also, if you’re having a lot of open cows or your pregnancy rates are not very high, you may want to look closer at nutrition, your health program, those type things. Then you have to work pretty closely with your veterinarian," he says.