With the vast majority of spring-born calves in the BETTER Farm programme now past the 28-day mark, we can look back at autumn calving 2016 and spring calving 2017. Who were the best operators and why?

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Calving interval

Table 1 shows the pick of the BETTER beef farmers from a calving point of view. While the BETTER group as a whole has some work to do around calving interval (384 days), the six listed here have their finger on the pulse already.

Calving interval is a crucial fertility performance measure on suckler farms – every day a cow slips beyond a 365-day calving interval takes €2.20 from our wallets. Fertility is a trait driven both by genetics and management of the animal.

When selecting sires for our herd, we should always look within the replacement index value. Where a herd needs a fertility injection, look for bulls with negative daughter calving interval (days) figures and cull hard for infertility.

From a management point of view, calving at target body condition, minimising hard calvings, moving quickly on to a high-energy diet (leafy grass or top-quality silage) post-calving and pre-breeding scanning can all help shorten intervals.

Culling

Culling any empty or slipping cows is the simple way to keep this figure, and the avoidable costs that come with it, low. Farmers with massive calving intervals are typically those carrying a small number of passenger cows who have been afforded the luxury of a year out from their duties.

One or two of these cows can ramp up the figure on an otherwise fertile herd. Infertile stock bulls or disease outbreaks can also send this figure skywards.

Earlier this year in the Irish Farmers Journal we demonstrated how reducing mortality from the national average of 6.4% to 4% in a 40-cow herd was worth an additional €21 per cow. Impressively, five of our BETTER beef farmers recorded no mortality at both birth and 28 days of age.

The calves-per-cow figure takes in a number of variables and is calculated in the following way:

(365/calving interval) x (number of calves alive at 28 days/number of eligible females)

In truth, if there was one figure to choose when looking at a herd’s calving performance, this would be it. Our top performer is Padraig O’Connor from Roscommon, followed by Louth’s Martin O’Hare.

Heifer calving age is an area where our group can improve – all of our farmers should be trying to calve at 24 months, yet just 31% of the heifers in the programme are doing so at present. Granted, many of our farmers have no defined calving spread at this point and are calving year-round – but this will tighten and so will heifer calving age where replacements are home produced.

Those with two defined calving spreads sometimes let autumn heifers purposely slip into the spring herd and vice versa, which is fine provided they don’t slip subsequent to this.

Some of our farmers are also choosing to buy in replacements and first-calving age is less of an issue here.

As a group, our BETTER farmers were disciplined this calving season – any animals that should have calved, as a whole, calved. Less than 3% of eligible cows in the BETTER farm programme did not calve.

However, 10% of the cows that calved had been recycled, having not calved during previous seasons. Our farmers will be tightening up in this regard in the future. Indeed, cull cow receipts will be a significant part of farm output. Once a steady flow of quality heifers are coming through, our BETTER farmers will have the capacity to be ruthless with their culling and develop top class-herds.

It seems that the group as a whole have bought into the easy-calving ethos, with less than 5% of calf births on BETTER farms needing significant farmer or veterinary assistance.

Top of the class

Padraig O’Connor, Roscommon

We didn’t reinvent the wheel here. Cows calve early in the spring, so after weaning in the back-end they go on to moderate quality silage. It was 68% DMD here this year. I segregate them so that the first 20 to calve are on one side of the shed. They get a pre-calver bolus five weeks out from calving. On springing up, they move to calving pens which are well-bedded. We have a calving camera here that’s linked to my phone and it’s been a serious investment – you have full control. Once bonded, cows and calves move to a separate straw shed where they run in small groups. This is cleaned out and limed weekly.

I believe in keeping things tight – 10 weeks is my calving spread. When you’re in the yard, it’s as easy to watch 50 as two. I’ve started to cull hard here as well. There is no mercy shown – you can’t in this game. The trick is to have plenty of replacements coming through to pick up the slack.