Calving Ease or Growth: How to Pick a Bull's Numbers

You can raise big calves or easy calves. Getting both takes some work at the sale barn. Every year some man buys the bull with the best weaning weight in the catalog, turns him on heifers, and spends two weeks in the calving pen at three in the morning. Here is how to keep that from being you.

Know what you are reading

The American Angus Association lists calving ease direct (CED, a percentage), birth weight (BW, pounds), calving ease maternal (CEM), weaning weight (WW), yearling weight (YW) and milk (Association data descriptions). CED tells you how easily his calves should come out of heifers. BW is the predicted weight at birth. CEM is about his daughters' ability to calve unassisted when they are cows. WW and YW are growth.

High CED is good. Low BW is good when you are worried about pulling calves. High WW and YW pay at the scale. The catch is that a bull with big growth usually carries some birth weight with him.

Why it is not a coin flip

Birth weight and growth run together in the genetics, so chasing growth pushes birth weight up. But they are not welded. Plenty of bulls carry moderate BW and good growth. Those are the ones worth paying for. And CED is not just birth weight backward. It takes in other things like calf shape, so two bulls with the same BW can calve differently.

Buy by who he will breed

Heifer bulls

First-calf heifers are small and tight. Put CED first and BW second, then look at growth. I would rather give up ten pounds at weaning than lose a heifer or a calf in labor. A heifer that calves unassisted breeds back sooner, and that is the whole game.

Cow bulls

Mature cows have more room, so you can push growth. Even here, set a birth weight limit and stick to it. The vet bill from one bad pull eats the premium from several heavy calves.

Bulls that will sire your replacements

Keep CEM and milk in your eye. Too much milk on thin pasture runs cows down. Daughters of a calving-ease bull carry that ease forward.

The screen I would run

1. Pick a CED floor and a BW ceiling for each group of females.
2. Drop every bull that fails, no matter how pretty his growth looks.
3. Rank the rest on growth and carcass for the market you actually sell into.
4. Check accuracy. A bull with low accuracy can drift a lot once his calves are on the ground.

That order matters, because calving trouble is the expensive mistake. Growth you can fix with next year's bull purchase. A dead heifer you cannot.

Where the dollar indexes fit

Indexes like $W for weaned calf value and $B for beef value roll several traits into one number. They save time. They also bake in somebody else's price assumptions. If you sell calves at weaning, $W is closer to your world. If you retain ownership, look at the carcass-side indexes. Read the index, then still check CED and BW yourself for the heifer group. Our bull buying checklist covers the physical side: feet, testicles, structure, and the semen test.

Using accuracy to your advantage

Every EPD comes with an accuracy figure, and it tells you how much weight to put on the number. A young bull with few progeny records may show great CED on paper, but that number can shift. A proven sire with high accuracy has already shown what he does. On the heifer group, lean toward higher accuracy on calving traits. Where you can, buy a bull from a seedstock man who will tell you honestly how his bulls have calved on his own heifers. That kind of straight answer is worth more than any glossy catalog.

Write down what happened

After each calving season, record birth difficulty by sire. Keep a simple notebook with the date, the sire, whether the calf was pulled and how big it looked. Two or three years of that will tell you which bulls actually calve easy in your pasture, and which ones only look good on the sheet. Genetics is a numbers game, but your own herd is the final test, and the notebook makes sure you learn from every season instead of repeating the same one.

Numbers do not replace management

An easy-calving bull on heifers that were overfed and too fat can still make you pull calves. Fat in the pelvic area and oversized fetuses do not care what the EPD said. Develop your heifers right, watch them close in calving season, and know when to call the vet. Our guide on when to help and when to call the vet is worth printing out and taping in the barn. The University of Nebraska beef program at beef.unl.edu has good calving management material too.

One more thing about the buyer

The end of the line is a steak. Programs like Certified Angus Beef reward carcass quality, so do not sacrifice marbling to get growth, or growth to get calving ease. Balance is cheaper than a correction. For more on what a bull does for the herd, see farm.fm's page on understanding bulls, and the agriculture directory can help you locate seedstock breeders near you.

Trait definitions and index weights get updated, so check the current Association materials before you bid. This site is independent and not affiliated with the Association or Certified Angus Beef.