Fenceline weaning: the same calves, two fewer days of bawling, and 20 more pounds

There is a week in October when every calf in the county gets pulled off its mother, run through a chute, loaded on a trailer, and dumped into a sale barn pen with 300 strangers. That week is where most of the year's respiratory disease comes from, and it is where a meaningful chunk of the calf's weight goes. The fix is not complicated. It is a fence.

What abrupt weaning costs

A calf weaned by separation and hauling will typically walk the fence and bawl for three to four days, eat very little, and lose 20 to 40 pounds before it settles. At $400 a hundredweight, that is $80 to $160 a head that walks off before the sale. The stress also drops the calf's immune function right when it is being exposed to every pathogen in the county, which is why the preconditioning piece from earlier this month told you to vaccinate three weeks ahead.

Fenceline weaning

Put the cows on one side of a good fence and the calves on the other, with nose-to-nose contact. The calves still see and smell their mothers. They just cannot nurse. In the UC Davis trial that put this on the map, fenceline calves bawled and walked less, spent more time eating, and were about 20 to 25 pounds heavier ten weeks later than calves weaned by total separation. Other trials since have found the same direction, with the size of the gap depending on forage.

What it takes:

• A fence the calves respect. Five-strand barbed with a hot wire on the calf side, or woven wire, or a good hi-tensile electric fence they have already been trained to. A three-wire pasture fence will not hold a 550-pound calf that wants its mother for the first 48 hours.
• The calves on the better feed. Put them on the pasture they already know if you can, with water they have already found, and move the cows. A calf that has to learn a new water tank while learning to live without milk is learning two things at once.
• Four to seven days. By the end of the week, the cows have dried up their interest and you can move them wherever they need to go.

Two-step weaning with nose flaps

The other option is a plastic anti-suckling flap that clips into the calf's nose. It lets the calf graze and drink but blocks it from nursing. Leave the flaps in for four to seven days with the pairs together, then pull the flaps and separate. The calf has already lost the milk; now it just loses the cow, and it handles those two losses better one at a time.

Flaps run about $2 to $3 each and are reusable. The cost is the extra trip through the chute to put them in and take them out, and some loss and irritation. Trials out of Saskatchewan found nose-flap calves vocalized less and gained more than abruptly weaned calves, similar to fenceline results. It fits operations that do not have a fence they trust or that are shipping calves to a different place at weaning.

Where it pays

Fenceline or two-step weaning is a piece of preconditioning, not a substitute for it. Combined with the vaccination timing, a 45-day post-weaning period, and a bunk-broke calf, it is what buyers are paying the $8 to $15 a hundredweight preconditioned premium for. On its own, it still saves you the weight loss and most of the first week's pull rate.

Where it does not fit: a drought year where there is no grass on either side of the fence. Then the question is not how to wean, it is whether to early-wean and sell the calves before the cows lose more condition. That is a different article, and that decision should have been made in August.

The one thing not to do

Do not wean and haul on the same day. If you have to sell at weaning, at least give them three days on the fence and a bunk before the trailer. The sale barn will not pay you extra for it, but the calves will weigh more, and the buyer who sees them not bawling will remember your brand next year.