Eden Shale Update- August 2024

It was a beautiful spring morning on Derby Day 2013 when I drove to Eden Shale Farm to take delivery on what would become the Kentucky Beef Network’s commercial cow herd. I’ll never forget the six gooseneck trailers lined up in front of the barn waiting to unload.

If you remember, we purchased those cattle out of stockyards from all across Kentucky. There were a few good cows mixed in among them, but most of them were just rough ol’ cows.  If you happened to attend our first Open House that year, you remember what I am talking about.

We had a big job in front of us to get the cows culled back to a productive set of females, all while keeping enough calves in the herd to pay the bills.  Those first five years were certainly a challenge.  The second year alone we had a 47% cull rate in the herd! 

With the help of Genetics Plus, we started an AI program in 2015 and exposed all the cows to one round of timed AI. This gave us the opportunity to introduce much better genetics into our herd, and it allowed us to start getting a more controlled breeding season. Early on if a cow was able to get bred, she was allowed to stay in the herd regardless of her performance because we needed warm bodies to create calves.  We have continued to AI every spring and have now developed a much tighter calving window.  This year we had every calf except for two stragglers born in 49 days, a big improvement over the 105-day calving season we had the first year.

Keeping and developing our own replacement heifers every year has allowed us to settle into a stable, young herd of cows that continues to get better with each AI selection. We have grown to 100 head of mature cows, and we develop roughly 25-40 of our own heifers each year. During this expanding process, we have also been able to increase our weaning weights while lowering our mature cow weight at weaning.  Our cows are now weaning 42% of their body weight on average, a number that is also slowly rising. While we still have a lot of work to do with our cow herd, we have come a long way from that first set of cows that were delivered in 2013.

Another component that we have improved is our cattle infrastructure.  Most of this has been completed with the help of Steve Higgins with the University of Kentucky. If you have attended a tour at the farm, you should have noticed that his influence is everywhere. We have completely changed our winter management to the extent that we pull the cows up to 125 acres to do all our winter feeding, yet we do not tear up our sod pastures and no renovations are required in the spring. Also, we are able to feed all our winter hay without the tractor veering off the gravel farm road. Implementing these management practices has eliminated any newborn calf death loss due to mud, scours or trampling at a hay ring, which is a massive improvement from our first three winters.
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This infrastructure has also been the topic of numerous farm tours over the last decade. In a normal year, we host about 40 tours and events at the farm. These tours range in participants from Kentucky producers, regulatory agencies and even international travelers. The Eden Shale Farm has given the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association an avenue of outreach and education that would not be possible in an office setting. I want to thank our board of directors for giving me the opportunity to operate this farm on their behalf. I hope that it is something that we can all be proud of.