Unlocking the Future of Conception, Calving and Cow Management

Shaye Koester  00:05

Hey, hey, it’s Shaye Koester and I’m your host for the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast where we connect you to ranchers and beef industry enthusiasts who can help you build a more profitable operation and improve your lifestyle.  Are you looking for a community of ranchers who support and challenge you to be more profitable and proactive? Then sign-up for our monthly RancherMind events. RancherMinds are mastermind events for ranchers to come together once a month and find solutions for their own and the industry's challenges.  Stay connected by following @cattleconvos on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and never miss an episode or event update by signing up for our newsletter on casualcattleconversations.com/newsletter.   If you get value out of this episode or any episode drop a comment or tip me by using the link in the show notes.  With that let’s see who our guest is today and connect you to a new resource to improve your own operation and lifestyle.   Alrighty. Well, Chad, thank you for hopping on the show today. I know we met at NCBA convention and had the opportunity to visit about all that you and your family are doing. I'm not going to explain that because that is your story. But to start off, would you please give my listeners a background on yourself and your family and kind of how you got started in the agriculture space, because you weren't always in beef, if I remember correctly.

Chad Wilkerson  01:23

That's correct. Amy and I will be married 30 years this year. We actually started in the pig industry. I started in about 1993. Amy and I were married in 92. About 1993, I started with Iowa Select Farms, Jeff Hanson, I worked in sow units and the first job I had was to fix a sow unit. And then the second one was to start up a sow unit and then start up another one. So my background is kind of starting up sow units. And after that, I went to Murphy's which was bought by Smithfield and I was a territory manager for them for about six years and then we had built a site. And about six years after we built the site, we changed that over to a research facility. So we did research for another 12 years after that. Anything from animal space trials, to chemical castration to vaccine to feed, I mean just a lot of different research projects. And then kind of after that, they decided to move the research kind of down to North Carolina. We were up to about 45,000 head of pig spaces at that time. Our kids were graduating and we wanted to kind of diversify. And so we decided to build a 320-foot hoop building and just do a commercial herd of Black Angus and Simmental cows. We got Charolais bulls from Lindskovs. Just going to make mousy-colored calves is what we're going to do. And at that time, we kind of started to sell some of our hogs sites. Currently today, we still have two sites that pretty much house about 1000 pigs. But a guy by the name of Austin Brant came to us and said, Hey, would you be interested in putting in some embryos? And so we decided to do that. So that's kind of our background of how we started doing this. And yeah, Amy grew up in Winterset, Iowa on a fat cattle farm, I guess, and farmed as well. I grew up on a farrow to finish operation, right where I'm sitting today. And that's kind of how we got started.

Shaye Koester  04:08

Well, awesome and there are some other questions that I'll come back to about, you know, how it's helped you to work in multiple segments of agriculture. But for now, will you describe in a little more detail what your operation does look like today with your recip program?

Chad Wilkerson  04:25

Yep. So today we roughly have about 1400 recips and we are located 40 miles west of Des Moines, Iowa. I mean we are flat black ground, I mean, ground selling for 16 to $18,000 an acre. We can't find any pasture. That's the big thing. There just is no pasture and to do what we do. It works very well to have those cows in hoop buildings because it's so easy to get them to a chute. So we have about 1400 head of cows all of our cows are in hoop buildings. Oh, we do have some and some outside lots but that's kind of how it looks here today we've got two hoop buildings, one 400 foot and one 320 foot we have the dirt work done for a third building which is going to be 480 foot but that's kind of how our system looks today. We calve all year round like I said you're gonna hear a lot of pig analogy here. We're not a spring and fall herd I'm probably going to get some pushback on this and as we talked at NCBA that's fairly inefficient. And I'm just saying you got to think outside the box and I think the cattle industry has got to change but we calve all year round. So we set up so many cows every week. We implant so many cows every week. We ultrasound so many cows every week. We calve out so many cows every week and we move cows every week. So it's more like a sow unit. What we have here is the farrowing rooms and the breeding barn. And then at another facility we have our gestation. So every week, we have cows that move from our farrowing facility, breeding facility to our gestation facility. And then every week we have cows that are about ready to calve that move to our farrowing slash breeding facility. So that's kind of how our thing works. The hoop buildings are like they're like a hammer. They're just a tool, okay? You can use them for several different things. You can calve in them. You can just you know have bulls in them. You can gestate in them, You can do replacement heifers. But the thing with those hoop buildings, they're just like a hammer. If you don't use it, right, you're gonna hit your thumb really hard, and it's gonna hurt. And it's the same way with the with the hoop buildings. If you don't manage that tool, right? It's really going to hurt. And Amy, my wife, which she's not here today, but I'm afraid I'll get sued for this someday. I'm a firm believer that women do a much better job of raising anything than what men do. Okay, men will walk by some calf and go oh, we'll see how it looks tomorrow. Women aren't like that. Amy, if there's something wrong, it's at the chute. Like right now. We bed our buildings every day. It's got to be dry. You got to keep the udders clean. You've got to keep the navels clean. It's no different than a farrowing facility. You've got to keep it dry. That's your biggest enemy is wetness and you got to keep it dry. So we scrape the drovers alley every day, and we bed every day, and if it is four o'clock in the afternoon and it's wet, Amy's gonna have you out there bedding again. That's just the way she rolls. So you've got to use the building correctly. And I think that's why a lot of times these hoop buildings have gotten kind of a bad rap. But you've got to keep it dry.

Shaye Koester  06:00

So you're doing a lot. There's a lot of moving cattle, there's a lot of bedding, there's a lot of handling cattle. What does that look like from a labor perspective? Like how much help do you have on your operation employees wise, even if that's family? How many people are there helping you day in and day out to make sure you're getting all this done?

Chad Wilkerson  08:57

Yep, we have seven full-time people and I'd like to give a couple shout outs. Kole Steiner is our production manager. He manages all the cows day-to-day movement. What cows go into what group because we're constantly moving groups by week. It's hard to explain. But he does all that without Kole, we wouldn't be where we're at. I'll just be very honest. I do not pay him enough. He just does a very, very good job. Amy takes care of all the calves. I'm more of the global thinker, I guess. Amy also does all the contracts. We do everything online through DocuSign. We don't take any checks. All our payments are done online. She does all that so she's in charge of calves and those two things. Blake Rutts works for us as well. He kind of does a lot of our processing, also feeding, maintenance, and whatnot. And then Clayton, my son, our son takes care of the pigs and then also feeds in the morning and then does any processing that we need or he's kind of a floater, I guess he helps do whatever. And we just hired a gal from Iowa State, Bridget Holcomb, her dad's a vet from Winterset. And she's coming on board and she will kind of be in a management role. Looking over the calves, kind of a shadow to Cole understanding the process of how we work cows in the computer programming system. And we're kind of grooming her for system two. We will be building a second system with another 1400 cows this summer/fall. And we're grooming her possibly to manage that if she would like. Then we have five part-time high school kids that come and work for us. And college kids that come in. Wyatt Applestuff he has been with us for four years in the summers. He goes to South Dakota State and man he works for us as well. So we're very fortunate. I know everybody talks about the labor aspect of everything. We are very fortunate. I mean, we've got a great crew here and we are looking at hiring more people. As I said, we are going to do site two. So if there's anybody out there listening to it and looking for a job change, give me a call.

Shaye Koester  11:36

Well, that's awesome and very amazing that you are able to find the labor and have obviously implemented systems to keep them around and make them want to come back. So with that, one of the points that we had talked about in previous conversations, is how you test the colostrum of each cow, correct? Do you want to talk about that a little more and your purpose and process behind that?

Chad Wilkerson  12:01

Yep. So here at Wilkerson farms, we keep about between 40 and 50 KPIs. In a sow unit KPIs are key production indicators. And they're a way to measure your business. But also, again, my background is research of owning the research facility and we have hired a part-time statistician to work for us. Just on a contract basis, Matt is his name. And he's actually doing all that compiling of the data. But we're doing things on the data side as conception rate, by bull, by donor, by time of year, by who made the embryo whether it's Transova or Vytelli, because we are a private company. We are not bound by Transova, Vytelli, Boviteq or anybody we're our own being. So we are compiling that data, whether it's fresh or frozen, IVF or conventional, I mean, we can go through all that. But one thing that we're doing is kind of new in the beef industry. We really don't know what colostrum does. In the dairy industry, we know exactly what the colostrum does and what levels you need to be at. So what we started doing here probably about four or five months ago, like I said, it's very easy to do because all of our cows are in hoop buildings. So after a cow calves, within 20 minutes, we bring that cow into our chute, we make sure all four quarters are open and good. We record and take a colostrum sample. We also have a refractometer and a centrifuge. And so that cow gives the colostrum sample. Then we take it and we put it in the refractometer. We take a claustrum sample and if it's under 22.5 on the brix scale, we supplement that calf with colostrum and we record that. Then 48 hours later, we bleed that calf and then we do a passive transfer test on that calf as well to see how much of that colostrum that calf that absorbed. And so we record all that information as well. And what we're going to do is we're going to take that information in time, we haven't got enough data points yet to make any, you know thought of, of what we how we need to go forward. But we're going to take that information and then we're going to we are going to lay it back on our treatment cost to see if okay, if a colostrum is under 25. Does our treatment cost go up compared to if it's if it's 28 our treatment cost is very minimal. So you know, that's all data that we're keeping here. We're trying, like I tell everybody, we're trying to be the Marriott, not the Motel Six. I mean, we're a 24-hour facility. So we're trying to do things and capture data that that other operations just can't do.

Shaye Koester  15:19

Well, that's really neat and I really like how you are, you know, bringing in those KPIs and capturing that data, and bringing that into the beef side. And so you've talked about it a lot. So I'm going to shift in that direction, but that would be you know, what are the main differences when you look at your background in swine production and beef production? And really how do you want the beef industry to change after being involved in both sides?

Chad Wilkerson  15:51

So I'm probably going to I don't know if we can cuss on here, but probably gonna piss some people off by saying this. I speak quite a bit in Nebraska and was just over in Blair speaking to a cattlemen banquet. I just spoke at Iowa State and I sometimes like to just smack people right in the mouth, right when I get up there. And, and one of my comments is the beef industry is the last protein industry to become efficient. And that's probably going to make people scratch their head a little bit. But if you really think about it, it is true. If you look at all the other protein industries, I don't count sheep and goats because I just don't. That's a whole different industry in itself. But if you look at fish, turkeys, chicken, pork, dairy, what do all those have in common? They've went to a systems approach, a system production approach to what they do. They measure data like there's no other, okay? And I'm not saying you have to do this, but they brought their production system inside. I don't think you have to do that in the beef industry. But I think there's some players out there that are going to force us to change. And I hate to tell you, it's not the packing industry. It's not. There are some players coming down down the pike that are going to be bigger than the packers, okay? They're going to force the packers to change which is going to force us to change. Okay? If you look at variability on the beef side, if you look at a ruler we are at 12 inches when it comes to variability, okay? Turkeys and chickens are about a half an inch on variability. Pigs are probably about an inch and a half. I think the variability of carcass and quality, especially carcass size would be the bigger one. The variability of that in the packing is going to make us change. I think we just have too much variability compared to the other protein industries. That's my own opinion.

Shaye Koester  18:25

And I appreciate hearing that.

Chad Wilkerson  18:29

You know what they say about about opinions so.

Shaye Koester  18:33

Well, but I mean, that's part of the reason I have the show is to share different thoughts and opinions and make people think and there's a lot of truth to what you said. And I mean, there's always things we need to be thinking about and making sure we can do things better. So I appreciate you bringing that up. So really, okay, so I'm going to flop back now back to the ET side when you first started with embryo transfer work and getting involved in that space. What were some of the main hurdles you faced?

Chad Wilkerson  19:07

We had two main hurdles. Well, three, it's amazing. It's kind of weird how as you go forward there's different hurdles because we don't have any pasture and we run a TMR all the time and we don't feed any hay. That's another thing. I don't have a bale of hay on the property. We feed corn stalks, DDGs corn, corn silage, some soy hull pellets and a liquid protein. But when we first started, we weren't feeding a toxin binder. And we had some problems with some conception rates. And working with Zack McCracken from soothers. We found out that we needed to use a toxin binder and as soon as we started using that our conception rate went right back up. Another one was water. If you're on a well, please check your water, it's like 18 bucks. I mean, it's not a huge deal. I mean, I spend more than that on a Friday night on things I probably shouldn't. Make sure your sulfur level in your water is is low, we had a problem with some sulfur in our water. And our conception rate kind of went down. We went all of our customers told him what was going on and refunded a lot of money. We wanted to make sure we were very truthful on that. So those were two constraints we had. Now we're getting to the point where we're growing so fast and believe me, I'm gonna say this, and everybody's gonna go. Yeah, I totally understand what you mean. But capital. Finding capital out there. We're working with several, several VCs on expansion and it's going very well. But you got to find partners, if you're going to expand this fast.

Shaye Koester  21:15

Well, thank you for sharing that. So what would be your advice for anyone trying to get into the embryo transfer space, whether that's, they want to flush their own cows, or they want to develop a recip herd? I mean, those are two different ends of it. But what advice do you have for people who want to enter this space of the beef industry?

Chad Wilkerson  21:32

In my opinion, and I know I'm in the business, but I'll walk you through my thought process. I think embryo transfer is the future of the beef industry. There's a few companies out there working on a terminal beef, which means, you know, they're gonna get a commercial donor, or a donor and a sire, and they're going to put them in a recip and those calves are gonna go directly to the feedlot. In my opinion, I think in the future, that's how you lower that variability that I just got to talking about and I think that company pretty much understands well, I know they do. We've had conversations, but that company understands where they're going. So I think embryo transfer is something that that is going to be the future. It's no different than the AI in the 70s. Okay, it's the future, we just got to figure out how to make it more efficient. And we've done that. I mean, if you look at AI in the 70s, compared to where we're at now, I mean, we're much better than we were, I think, I think, you know, your 42% conception rate average on embryos, I think in the next, you know, 10 years is probably going to probably be at 60, if we can figure more out. But I think on that side, yes, I that's the future of the beef industry, in my opinion. I do believe, if you want to get into the business that I'm in, as in doing embryo transfer, number one, you better have a lot of capital or partners to do it. You've got to have a system, which we've pretty much figured out. And you'd better be ready to not sleep very much. There's just a lot of responsibility. I mean, there's calves out here that haven't even been born yet that were sold on a sale three months ago. So there's just a little bit of stress when it comes to that kind of stuff. So and we've got I mean, we've already got people that have put their their money down on spots a year from now. I mean, the demand is there. But just from experience, if you're thinking about just doing a spring herd, or just doing a spring and fall herd and you're going to implement or do do a recip business. You're going to struggle with efficiency. So

Shaye Koester  24:15

Well, thank you for sharing that. And you know, you've hit any other question I was going to ask and other responses. So as we wrap up today, do you have any final thoughts or messages you want to share? With my audience?

Chad Wilkerson  24:29

Yep, we are. We have announced a new program that we have. We are looking for partners with 300 head or more and I haven't quite figured out how what radius we need to do. But if you have 300 head or more cows, we would be interested in a partnership in which we would bring your cows into our program. We would carry them out here, put embryos in them, get them bred, and then we would ship them back to you. It's a five year agreement. And you can sell your bulls. No creep feed, no lactation feed. You don't have to get up at two o'clock in the morning to pull a calf. No replacement cost. There's just a lot of positives to it. And you will make the same amount as if you were calving out yourself. So if you're interested in that, please give us a call. We'd be more than happy to talk to you about it. Like I said, we're located in central Iowa. I don't think I'm probably interested in somebody in Nevada or North Dakota. But but if you're if you're somewhat close, we'd be interested in talking.

Shaye Koester  25:57

Is there a website? Or should I put your contact information in the show notes? How can they reach out to you Chad?

Chad Wilkerson  26:04

We do have a website, it's Wilkersonfarms.net and then you can visit our Facebook, there's a number on there as well. There's just Wilkerson farms. Where you can get a hold of me directly at 641-757-9511.

Shaye Koester  26:19

Well, awesome, thank you very much for hopping on the show today and sharing your story and thoughts about the future of the beef industry. I really appreciate it.

Chad Wilkerson  26:28

Well, I'm sorry it took so long to get together. But I certainly appreciate you asking us.

Shaye Koester  26:34

And that's a wrap on that one. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on the episode and if you have any further questions around the topic, take care and have a great day.