Weather: Cumulative rainfall for July-February period was 273 mm, -53% compared with the historical average for the same period. Drought has plagued the northern region since March 2021. Even if we are still facing heat waves, the good news is that we get again some rainfalls which immediately boosted the pasture in some plots. As autumn progresses, rainfalls are expected to gradually normalize.
Cattle operation: We have around 2,500 heads at the farm, mostly cows, heifers and calves. Dryness has affected the whole region for the last 18 months and has affected the shape of our herd at various levels (well-being, production, diet, fertility, etc) as well as pastures available.
We have around 1,100 cows and heifers’ and we are expected a bit more than 1,600 births between the 1st and 2nd spring service. We are performing an early weaning over 320 baby calves. Below you can see some weaned calves and on the 2nd video, none weaned calves. Early weaning has become a drought management tool. It provides the most cost effective way of maintaining cow condition to ensure that they get back in calf at their next joining.
In drought situations, early weaning enables you to use containment areas to reduce grazing pressure on pastures and control the risk of erosion. For us, it enables also an earlier sale of non-productive, empty or old cows reducing feed and water use. The sale value of those animals will be higher than to keep them for another service, especially when meat prices raises significantly (+18% YTD) as it is the case currently.
Under the challenging weather conditions we experiment, it is worth to perform the analysis of doing earlier sales of females or calves rather than to keep them and increase your costs (supplementation, vet, etc). It takes 18 months to recover from an intense drought as we faced. Therefore, we are in the process to sale between 350/400 calves in advance.
We are also analyzing the opportunity to clean further 200 ha of fields. Previous operation done give decent results (450 ha cleaned) and the farm needs permanent control of the natural vegetation which is typical for the region of Salta (a formerly forest area with a subtropical highland climate).