MITCHELL — The snow’s blowing sideways, the heavy stuff. It’s one of the few winter storms this year and it happens to fall on the first days of March, calving season.
I arrive at Steve Easton’s farm in Hanson County in southeastern South Dakota, prepared, wearing long underwear, snow pants, ski mask. What I was not prepared for was finding Steve, in a T-shirt and jeans sitting at his kitchen table.
“You look like you’re dressed for bad weather,” Steve smiles.
He has no plans to go outside today. And he doesn’t need to. From where he sits, he has a crystal-clear view of those cows that are close to labor on a TV divided into eight smaller screens, one for each camera.
I was shocked: “That is insane.”
The last brush I had with calving was in the early ‘90s at a friend’s ranch, where every two hours they rode a four-wheeler through the pasture to check on cows.
Record low cattle numbers
Steve’s calving cameras blew me away — and led me on a journey to understand how science and technology have made calving more efficient. Read: saving money.
The number of cattle in the U.S. today is at a record low, numbers not seen since 1951, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Over the years, historic drought conditions left little food for cows in the pasture and forced producers to sell their herds.
In 2024, Americans ate around 59 pounds of beef on average, up from the year before, according to the USDA. Short supply and strong demand mean a higher price. Add a recent temporary ban on importing beef from Mexico due to a parasite and USDA estimates that beef prices will hit new highs in 2026.
Ranchers are looking for efficiency: How to consistently produce the best beef that consumers want. In South Dakota, it’s big business with four times as many cattle as humans.
The cost of raising cattle for beef is an investment. Depending on feed costs and operation size, producers can spend hundreds to thousands raising a single animal before it goes to slaughter, confirms Erin DeHaan,
South Dakota State University professor and extension beef specialist.
Too expensive to just cross their fingers and pray that it all works out.
A family affair
Easton calves part-time. In search of a larger, full-time calving operation, I traveled just 10 miles from the North Dakota border near Leola to a fourth-generation ranch with around 1,000 head of cattle.
A red tractor-trailer is backed up to the cattle corral. A handful of Erdmann family members are loading up their Black Angus heifers — each weighing around 1,100 pounds. These are year-old cows that have yet to get pregnant.
With the heifers loaded, the tractor-trailer heads 25 miles south to Wetonka, South Dakota, the south ranch.
By mid-May, the heifers will be ovulating. The Erdmanns will remove their intrauterine device, or IUD, birth control and give each one a hormone shot to get their cycles in sync. But first Erdmanns must choose the bulls.
The bull: By the numbers
It’s a family research effort. The Erdmanns, Anne Jo, her husband, Dan, their son, Royce, and his Uncle Joe all flip through glossy magazines with high-quality profile photos of bulls, complete with bios and stats. Like a dating profile but with more accurate information.
They search online profiles and talk to other ranchers about their favorite bulls.
Anne Jo is also a sperm dealer. She sells and delivers straws of bull semen to customers. She got an alert about a young bull out of Montana named Spectrum. “We liked his numbers. We liked his pedigree,” Anne Jo says.
One look at his profile page and you can see why. His photo, taken by a professional photographer, shows a side profile of pure black Spectrum standing in fresh hay. This literal stud was born on Valentine’s Day in 2020.
His bio speaks for itself: “He is the perfect combination of Cow Sense & Science and will raise the bar for nearly every measurable trait.”
If you click on Spectrum’s extended online profile, more than 100 different numbers pop up. The stats show everything from his offsprings’ average birth weight to how his daughters perform as first-time moms to the marbling score of his offsprings’ beef.
It also shows the accuracy of those stats: The more offspring, the greater likelihood a future calf will follow Spectrum results. He’s fathered more than a thousand.
Diversify to increase success
But numbers aren’t everything. Both Anne Jo and Steve Easton tell me some producers have been known to fudge their stats, hiking up the value of their bulls.
“That's why we don't hop in, hog wild, and breed all of our heifers to just one brand new bull. We've seen the next ‘Wonder Bull’ umpteen times,” Anne Jo says.
So the Erdmanns diversify, buying several different bulls’ semen to artificially inseminate their heifers.
To check for a viable pregnancy, they hire a traveling veterinarian from Missouri. With a portable ultrasound machine, he takes just seconds to check if a cow is expecting. The ultrasound image projects on special eye glasses he wears, saving time and effort lugging around a screen.
When a cow is close to giving birth, she’s moved into one of the barns with cameras to watch over her labor.
Cameras were a game-changer
This technology was a turning point on the Erdmann ranch. Royce, representing the fourth and youngest generation, tried for years to persuade his dad to add cameras to the farming operation.
“Nope. We don’t need it,” Royce remembers Dan’s repeated reply.
Royce, a board member on the South Dakota Angus Association, heard from other ranchers loving their cameras, wishing they'd installed them sooner. So Royce called the company himself and ordered a camera system at his own expense.
“They installed it. And he said it was stupid,” Royce says.
It didn’t take long for his dad to jump on board.
The cameras mean freedom. Now they can run into town and still check the status of calving on their smartphones, which they can also do from the comfort of bed. It also allows pregnant cows to labor in peace, without disruption.
The technology also saves lives, Steve Easton attests. The eight cameras, which cost him around $2,500, enables him to quickly spot a calf in trouble, such as having its cord wrapped around the neck, being born in the gestational sac or rejected by its mama.
“So if you save one calf, it pays for itself in a year,” Steve says.
But there’s something worth even more than money, says Robin Salverson, a cow/calf field specialist with South Dakota State University Extension.
“Our time is so valuable, and I don't think many of us put a dollar value to our time or even to our health, to tell you the truth.”
EDITORS NOTE: This story first appeared on
https://www.sdnewswatch.org/