While not all of these females will make it to the cow herd, commercial cow and heifer slaughter during the first months of 1995 has not been large enough to offset those replacement females that will. The earliest possible reduction in beef supplies will be 1997, but could be postponed to as late as 1998. Let's start at the beginning. In order to know where you are headed, you must know where you came from. Production and financial records tell us this.
Most ranches keep historical production and financial records of some type.
Granted, a ranch can keep too many records. Records that are being kept need to be used in the management and marketing of ranch resources. From here, determine how many females were intended to be bred. Using this adjusted figure, we can then determine percentages such as pregnancy, calving and weaning, pounds produced per female, and pounds produced per acre. These figures help identify production problems such as the point where production has been lost.