Tommie Holmes farms 18ha near Ballina and he currently keeps 20 suckler cows. Bull problems have scuppered his calving pattern, but by the end of the BETTER farm beef programme he hopes to be calving 25 cows in the autumn.

Tommie is currently finishing his progeny and plans to keep doing so. Males currently go as bulls and he is achieving carcase weights of 344kg at 18 months. As the programme progresses, Tommie will look to push these animals to a heavier weight at a younger age.

His herd is Angus-based, both cow and sire, and he will tend toward more continental genetics in the years to come to drive individual animal performance. Indeed, Tommie has no choice but to cull and replace given his current calving situation. A stock bull problem means that he now has eight months in the year with a calving.

Tommie’s current stocking rate is 1.9 LU/ha and he is achieving a liveweight output of 727kg/ha. This translates into a gross margin of €430kg/ha. The team has set Tommie the target of a stocking rate of 3.2LU/ha, 1,500kg/ha of output and a gross margin in excess of €1,500/ha.

A portion of this stocking rate will be on concrete – Tommie has ample shed space to exploit these assets. Tommie will purchase 40 bulls per annum – provided market prices allow – for finishing. He will look to take in a 400kg weanling bull between December and February for €2.20 to 2.40/kg.

A problem with pH

Tommie’s soil tests revealed that 0% of the farm was optimum for pH (lime) and just 25% was at optimum concentration for phosphorus and potassium. He is targeting quite a high stocking rate and will need to work on these, spreading a large amount of lime in year one of the programme. During the grazing season, he will move away from CAN and urea fertilisers, opting instead for 18:6:12 and 10:10:20, depending on cashflow. Very low-index soils will get Super P and muriate of potash.

Given his proposed autumn-calving system, the pressure will come off grassland in the springtime. However, if he plans to keep going down the bull beef road, he will need to unsure material of the utmost quality under his yearling bulls.

He is already operating a paddock system, but given his low stocking rate, it is difficult to keep grass under control at current growth rates. His average farm cover is over 1,300kg DM/ha at present. Ideally, it could shrink to almost half of this, a move which would ensure that pure leaf was going into animals at all times.

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All reports from the BETTER farm programme