According to the Teagasc/Irish Farmers JournalBETTER Farmprofit monitor results, the 16 month bull system currently reaps the most rewards.

To hit spec at this age, the animal stays indoors after its first and only winter and is built up to a high concentrate diet around its first birthday. It is a progressive, intensive system that suits well-bred animals. This will be our third year slaughtering bulls at the said age. It suits this holding well, but...there’s always a “but”...

Here’s a mind-bending statement. Producing bulls at 16 months has made our enterprise less intensive.

How? I hear you ask.

In previous years we slaughtered our males as heavy bulls at approximately 20 months. Yearling bulls returned to grass for three months post-winter before being re-housed for a concentrate finish. They were away just in time for housing cows and weanlings in the back-end.

This allowed us to increase cow numbers, as no calves remained on the holding for a second winter (heifers killed at 20 months). Producing heavy bulls brought our spring/summer stocking rate to near 2.3 LU/ha. Now, 20-25 less yearlings turn out to pasture in the spring. This has brought us back down to 1.8 LU/ha. Our daily herbage demand is 35kg DM/ha/day and we currently have an average of 25 days ahead across three blocks. In this part of the world, one would expect growth in excess of 50 kg DM/day by the last week in April.

What to do? Increase cow numbers? Not possible without further building. The slatted units here are at full capacity with weanlings and cows alone. Make more silage? There will be 100 surplus bales after the winter of 2014/2015. Buy in some stores for the grazing period? We operate on a strict closed-herd basis.

One possible solution, which I briefly discussed with resident Irish Farmers Journal tillage contributor Julian Hughes, would be to go semi-self-sufficient with our bulls. Firstly, land would need to be freed up. Stocking rates would have to increase and in-turn, some silage ground would be sacrificed; neither measure overly extreme.

We would need to grow ten acres of barley, yielding 2.7 t/acre, to feed 25 bulls during their final 120 days. I’m informed that this would cost €4,000 to produce before any storage/treatment. The same quantity of dry-rolled barley would cost €5,100 from the feed mill. Perhaps someone more adept could share treatment costs with us. I suspect there is not a lot in the difference.

Wild bird cover in GLAS perhaps?