All action on the western front

In Donegal, the Grieves have retained 10 of their best bulls for fattening in what will be their first attempt at finishing cattle. The farm is run by father and son duo Gerard and John Grieve, with John’s brother Gerard Jnr also lending a hand. Just seven of their 36 cows are left to calve.

Normally it takes a couple of years to really find your feet in the finishing game, but it’s very much a case of so far, so good with the Grieves’ first batch of bulls. Lifetime average daily gain required in an under-16-month bull finishing system is around 1.28kg per day. This equates to a 380kg carcase at 15.5 months, assuming a kill-out of 58.5%. The gold standard is to aim for a 500kg animal on its first birthday and the Grieves must be commended for achieving this in year one (Table 1). At that point they had begun to feed their bulls on hard and now they are three to four weeks from slaughter, eating 12.5kg meal /head. To achieve a group average of a 380kg carcase I estimated that the bulls would need to achieve a weight gain of 1.43kg from early January to slaughter.

Given the good genetics and feed management in place, this shouldn’t have been an issue. The factory scales will tell all.

The biggest challenge in cattle finishing is the final phase. A high-concentrate feeding period is required for at least the three months pre-slaughter in order to tick our fat score boxes (minimum 2+). Often, our animal might be doing healthy gains (~1.5kg/day) on a modest amount of concentrate (5-6kg) with good silage. While excellent performance, the likelihood is that the composition of this gain is mostly muscle. Fat does not weigh like muscle – it is a much less dense tissue, but takes a lot of energy to deposit. So while we mightn’t see a huge change on the scales when we begin to feed hard, rest assured that we are doing a job.

Insufficient fat score (<2+) means no Quality Assurance payment and a penalty on prices – typically a loss of between €50-100 per head, potentially more. We simply cannot afford these consequences.

Elsewhere on the farm, the Grieves are in a healthy situation from a fodder point of view and a budget carried out earlier in the winter shows a supply that will last into early April. Young calves are getting out to grass by day and over 80% of the farm’s slurry has been spread. Last weekend, 35 units of nitrogen/acre (urea) was spread on 40 acres of grazing ground. Seventeen light heifers will get to grass on Saturday, weather permitting.

Nigel O’Kane represents Galway in the BETTER farm programme. A full-time plumber with his own business, he keeps sheep and sucklers on 25ha at Claregalway.

“I have 16 calved out of 27 and we started on 8 February. It’s going well, I only had to touch one and she started calving on the slats against a wall. I think she would have calved herself otherwise,” Nigel said.

Dry cows are on a diet of moderate-quality silage pre-calving, with access to mineral lick buckets from December. The full complement should be calved by 31 March. Nigel used the NCBC Charolais sire LZF on three of his pedigrees as well as Simmental SI2152 and his own stock bull (CH) by Trezegoal. He also has three Angus x British Friesian heifers in calf to popular Limousin bull ZAG.

“I rear 20 to 23 dairy cross calves every year and this is my first time to put any in calf. Hopefully it goes well. I know there’ll be milk behind them,” he said.

At present, 10 cows and calves are out full-time and Nigel is waiting until after the wet weather forecast for the middle of this week before letting any more cattle out.

“There’s no meal of silage going into the cows, just good grass and magnesium buckets. The ground we closed up last back end is paying dividends now,” Nigel said.

Sheep grazed Nigel’s silage ground from November to three weeks ago and it has since been closed and spread with slurry. Half a bag of urea has gone across all of Nigel’s ground apart from an outfarm. There is good grass here and Nigel hopes to get cattle there this weekend.