Carnew mart in Co Wicklow is gearing up for a busy sales day on Wednesday with a clearance sale of Colin Tyner’s top-quality 100-cow suckler herd taking place at 2pm and followed at 4pm by the marts weekly weanling sale.
The clearance sale includes 90 mainly Limousin and Parthenaise-cross cows and 10 Aberdeen Angus cross in-calf heifers.
The herd was established over 30 years ago and comprises a high percentage of four- and five-star cows on the replacement index.
Limousin
The foundation of the herd is Limousin-cross cows sourced from the same dairy herd with Angus cross heifers sourced in recent years.
The Parthenaise-cross cows in the herd have been bred from the Limousin-cross cows while there are also a small number of Hereford-cross cows.
The age profile ranges from in-calf heifers to proven performers aged up to 10 years of age. The herd has a calving interval of 362 days and Colin explains that he has always maintained a ruthless culling policy with any cow not going in-calf or presenting problems culled.
Stock bull
The majority of cows are calving in February and March to a top-quality Belgian Blue stock bull while heifers are calving to a Hereford stock bull.
The Belgian Blue stock bull has super terminal figures. He has a terminal index €uro-Star value of €229. This is driven by a massive carcase weight figure of 62kg and a conformation score of 3.45.
Calving difficulty score
For these figures the bull is relatively good on his calving difficulty score with a predicted calving difficulty of 9.3%.
The bull is throwing good-quality blacker-type calves as reflected in the photos. The herd has practiced a suckler-to-beef system with bulls finished mainly in an under-16 month finishing system while heifers are finished at 20 to 22 months of age.
Colin says the cows have consistently produced E and U grade with Herdplus data shows bulls consistently achieving carcase weights of 400kg upwards.
Scroll through the carousel to see a selection of cows on offer while further information can be found about the sale on Carnew Mart’s Martbids adverts page.
Martbids is a new App brought to you by the Irish Farmers Journal and livestock marts and can be downloaded for free on Google Play and the App store.
It allows users to access a range of details on animals including breed, age, movement, QA and ICBF status etc before they enter the sales ring and also allows monitoring of prices while present in the mart.