Custom Feeding Dairy Heifers

Anonymous-0 · Nov 19, 2008

I am seriously looking at custom raising heifer calves. I would like to get them from the farms as wet calves and raise them to 6 months of age. I would like to eventually raise them from wet calves to prefreshening, but don't have the land base to do this yet. Is there a demand for this type of business? I'm in NE Iowa.

My two biggest concerns are....

1. Finding producers to raise calves for. What is the best way to get in touch with people who need my service?

AND

2. Writing a contract that is simple and fair to both parties.

Your thoughts and suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks
Jake

John (C-IL) · Nov 19, 2008

We have a guy here that is doing that for a local dairy. He is raising 2000 replacements a year and his daily feed cost per head is running about 38 cents per head per day. So, you can see that if they freshen at 20 months he is going to have about $240/ head just in feed costs.

I would be surprised if you could find someone interested in your services if you weren't able to handle at least 100 head at a time. Plus, if you were to be able to find people interested in your services, how many would you have to raise to make enough money to make it worth while.

You have probably spotted one of the better money making areas of livestock raising, but you need to work real hard on a budget and a business plan to see if it is truely feasible.

Anonymous-0 · Nov 19, 2008

20 months seems abit early,that's 1 year and 8 months old,1-10 or 1-11 seems abit more the norm for the early ones?Maybe they calve them out that early in other areas?The milk recording people tell us that it costs upwords of $2400 to raise a newborn to calving at 24 months of age,so unless the prices are very storng,she had better be a good one lol.

farmer boy · Nov 19, 2008

We fed veal calves a few year ago for another guy. We had just over 450 at one time but about 250-300 regularly. Don't plan to get rich off of it because if that was the case the guy would just do it himself. To make a living off of it you would have to have 700-1000 calves but we were doing other thing like stockers to it all sort of worked together. We didn't have calves in the barns and the guy asked us about it so that doesn't really answer that question. We also didn't have a contract so that don't help you either. It also takes alot of the risk out of things to do it this way.

Custom Feeding Dairy Heifers

Anonymous-0

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John (C-IL)

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Anonymous-0

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farmer boy

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