Leah Peterson of Clear Creek Ranch

“Well we culled really hard last year. Late moisture that didn’t really come until it was time to go to grass. We culled really hard in the spring and so we’re down a little bit on numbers currently of mature cows. However we raise our own replacements and so had that discussion multiple times in recent days as we weigh drought planning with trying to restore numbers, but typically somewhere around 500 adult cows on the place that would include heft bread heifers somewhere around there. A lot of people turn up their nose at calving heifers. We make very careful intentional decisions in our breeding programs so that we don’t have a battle at calving time but I would rather be raising heifers right now and calving heifers than I would be spending money buying mature bred cows.”

~ Clear Creek Ranch mom Leah Peterson.