We try to calve out about 220 head per year. Approximately the top 60% of the heifers are retained and developed from each crop. We use this as an insurance of sorts. In the event that we have to sell more mature cows than anticipated (drought, poor breed up, etc.) we can keep all of our bred heifers, and go into the next year with close to our target head number. If everything goes as it should, we can cull normally and still have some bred heifers available to sell. These are all heifers that we would happily put back into our own herd.
To select the sale heifers, we look mostly at the anticipated calving dates. We take a cross section of the dates to lighten the load on our facilities at calving time. Of course we also keep the daughters of our favorite dams in our own herd in order to have even better cattle to offer for sale in the future.
