“This is not a cheap game. Every input counts. That’s the great challenge of our modern age,” says Morgan Kauth of K Heart Cattle.
Kauth and his wife, Danielle, breed and raise registered Herefords near Ivanhoe, Minn. “We’re a small producer with 24 mamas. Most others are commercial producers, so one of the challenges to making our way is that we don’t have 55 years in it,” he explains. “We’re always looking for ways to increase our operation's low input and high efficiency by asking ourselves, ‘How do you market? When do you invest?’”
To help answer those questions, the Kauths collaborated in 2024 with the Great Plains Heifer Development program at the University of Nebraska’s Haskell Agricultural Laboratory near Concord. They consigned two heifers to see how their genetic codes lined up. This year, in the program's second season, the Kauths returned with six consigned heifers.
Connor Biehler, a Nebraska livestock Extension educator, oversees the Great Plains Heifer Development program, along with consultation from Rick Rasby, Nebraska Extension specialist and Department of Animal Science professor, and Kiernan Brandt, former South Dakota State University Extension educator.
The program is designed to help beef producers refine heifer development and reproductive efficiency, and offer services focused on heifer selection, feeding, management, genetic tools, estrus synchronization protocols, post-breeding management and more.
MAKING MOST OF GRASS: At K Heart Cattle, “We start grazing in early April and move the girls every day,” Morgan Kauth says. “Calves are raised with mother's milk, fresh grass and access to minerals. We do not offer creep feed in order to see the true potential of a growing animal. In June, we go out to the wildlife leases, move every five to seven days, and then come home to cornstalks.” (Photo by K Heart Cattle)
Bringing cattle back to HAL
“My friend Kiernan Brandt and I did our master’s degrees at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, working on a similar program called the Tennessee Beef Heifer Development Program,” Biehler says. “Since there’s not really anything like that up here, we just saw a need. I guess it's a little unique to this area. We wanted to take this opportunity to learn more about the cow herd.”
In its second year, the program has heifers coming from producers in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. “We received about 160 head of cattle this year, up from last year,” Biehler says. “Haskell Ag Lab hadn’t had cattle in almost a decade. Once we found a place to do this, the community was really glad to have cattle back in those pens. The farm crew generally takes care of the day-to-day feeding. Kiernan and I are there for data collection, breeding and pregnancy checking. It's a good team and system.
“The No. 1 goal of this program is as an education service,” he adds. “We’re not in a business developing heifers. We’re really just trying to learn the unknowns of the cow herd and reduce the fallout of young cows within the herd and increase longevity.
“We can benefit a producer of any size,” Biehler explains. “If it's a big producer that only wants to learn about a small portion of their heifers, they can send us 20 to 40 of them. And we can collect data while saving them some feed resources. But I really think it benefits the smaller producers that maybe only hold five to 10 heifers back.
“You kind of have to manage heifers as their own group. By sending them to us, they don’t have to focus on keeping their heifers separate from their mature cow herd and managing them like that. We can take care of that. For the most part, producers find us through articles, our website and word of mouth.”
MANAGING PROGRAM: Nebraska Extension livestock educator Connor Biehler and his team administer the Great Plains Heifer Development program through data collection, breeding and pregnancy-checking the consigned heifers. In the program’s second year, they have heifers from Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. (Photo by Holly Wortmann)
Offering new information
Kauth, a SDSU graduate in natural resources, learned of the program from a podcast featuring Biehler.
“I’m a regenerative guy,” Kauth says. “We work with the land through rotational grazing and herd management practices, which is more of a Western-style operation. We start grazing in early April and move the girls every day. Calves are raised with mother's milk, fresh grass and access to minerals. We do not offer creep feed in order to see the true potential of a growing animal. In June, we go out to the wildlife leases, move every five to seven days, and then come home to cornstalks.
“UNL’s heifer development program utilizes technologies and tools to collect information that we otherwise would not likely have used,” Kauth adds. “The information collected helps us get a baseline of our foundation genetics and female performance. The performance in the program and the data is a decision-making tool to drive genetics.”
“Each consignor gets their data back on their cattle specifically,” Biehler says. “We use this pooled data when we host our field day in the fall and on an annual basis to create value and education, always to help the community improve their cow herd.
"Some of the challenges we face are the logistics of working with different producers and groups of people and cattle. And we’re always looking to work with new industry products, so learning the new products and technology can be a process.”
“We see the heifer development program as an investment,” Kauth says. “One that we’ll see our dollars back. I hope we can demonstrate that even though we’re small, our goal is to grow. That’s another reason we’re coming back, to see and gauge our genomics and breed for maternal power. We’re looking for strong mama cows that have adapted to my environment and system of moving and walking. We want our female power to stay home.
“I consider this the grinding phase of my life, and I’m only in my 30s. To be in this, you need conviction, and that’s a challenge. I’m not very scared. I look at the challenges. I have an outstanding team. My wife, my in-laws and the folks with the data are helping us elevate the efficiency of the herd and our community.”
To learn more about the Great Plains Heifer Development program at UNL’s Haskell Ag Lab, contact Biehler at 402-624-8007 or heiferdev@unl.edu, and visit hal.unl.edu/resources.