Calving Bingo: Insider Info for 2025

Once upon a time, we were very unsure of who would be having a baby when here on the farm, which led to some unexpectedly chaotic days between April and June. But that chaos led to what has now become known as Calving Bingo. If you know, feel free to scroll down to “What clues do I have for Calving Bingo?” to get your insider info. If you don’t know, let’s talk about where Calving Bingo came from, shall we? 

What is Calving Bingo?

Calving Bingo Card for 2025

Calving bingo started as a fun way to help my followers get involved with our spring calving season. My husband and I were already guessing who was going to calve next, so why not have the internet play along too?

I threw together a little graphic with photos of our pregnant animals layed out in a grid format and made a post asking people to comment with their guess on who would calve first. Then as the babies dropped, I’d update the graphic with who had yet to calve, and asked for new guesses on who the next new mom would be. This little game of “guess who will have her baby next” has since come to be known as “Calving Bingo”.

How am I able to give insider info this year?

In past years, your guess on who would have a baby next was literally as good as mine. We had no idea who was bred when because our bull was just out there doing his thing!

All we could do was start with the basics: take the day we let the bull out, add 283 days (the average gestation length for a cow) and voila → that was our rough estimate for when calving might start. Then we’d do the same thing for the day we pulled the bull off the pasture to get the potential closing of our calving season.
Sure, we’d keep an eye on the usual physical signs of a cow being close to having her calf, but really it was a total guessing game.

But this year? This year is different. And I’m so excited!

This year we get to see the results from the launching of our AI program last summer. (The artificial insemination kind of AI, not the robot kind, just to be clear.) We still had our bull, Zeus, out to run clean up with the herd after AI, and we bought a couple of bred heifers that we don’t have exact due dates on, so there’s still lots of room for guesses to be made.

But here’s the big difference this year: I’ve got actual DATA. Like real, legitimate, uploaded-into-CattleMax data! That means we now have specific breeding dates and calculated due date windows for every single one of our animals. And that, my friend, gives you a MAJOR advantage in this year’s round of Calving Bingo.

What clues do I have for Calving Bingo?

Here’s what we know!

*Disclaimer! We did a couple rounds of AI along with having a cleanup bull, so none of these due dates are guaranteed because we don’t know if the AI actually took or if Zeusey Boy got them pregnant.

Bonus Game!

This year in addition to guessing which cow will have her baby next, we’re adding a second layer of fun!

Our bonus game for this year is…🥁🥁🥁

“WTF Will Her Baby Look Like?!?"

How are we able to play this game? Well, we’ve introduced a brand new breed into the herd!

If you’ve been following along the past few years, you probably noticed our herd trending more and more toward solid black calves. That’s thanks to a strong influence of Black Angus genetics. But this year? Things are getting colorful again.

In addition to our usual mix of Hereford, Simmental, Black & Red Angus, and Highlander, we’ve now introduced British White Park into the mix, and I am sooo excited to see what this year's babies will look like!!

We used both British White and Hereford semen during AI, and we also had our British White bull running with the herd. Buuut I left out those details from your cheat sheet on purpose. 😉

Because where’s the fun in guessing if it’s too easy?

Ready to play?

Make sure you’re following me on Facebook and Instagram where I’ll be posting our official Calving Bingo cards throughout our calving season so you can drop your guesses and join in on the fun!

And don’t forget to join my email list because that’s where I’ll be sharing baby calf updates first before they ever hit social media.