I knew this would happen as soon as the decision was made to start replacing beef cattle with dairy calves reared under contract.

I killed 13 steers towards the end of September, and strong beef prices put a real polish on their performance. Perhaps when I decide to buy replacement stores we’ll see the shiny veneer isn’t so long-lasting after all.

And, yet, this healthy margin from buying to selling has only reinforced my belief that the huge fluctuations in beef profits are just not sustainable. Never knowing whether you’re going to make a handsome profit, or blow money, cannot be a good way to run a business.

There is no doubt, however, that when prices are high everything just slots together like a jigsaw. Good prices are like sunlight; when the sun shines the whole world looks like a better place, and if you have beef cattle for sale then all those questionable management decisions appear to have been made by someone with a wise head.

Modest

Last year’s store cattle were fed less than 2kg of meal during the winter, and received nothing except grass since turnout.

This relatively modest system should translate into a healthy gross margin, and may even leave proper money when we stray into the net margin calculations. As always, I don’t count any chickens until the last beast is away and the fat lady has started singing, so it’ll be a month or two yet before results are finalised.

Nor should I be making too many assumptions about physical performance. But I couldn’t resist crunching a few figures for these 13 individuals (why is it so much more appetising to do these calculations when something has made money?).

Daily liveweight gains from turnout on 12 April until slaughter (the only true reflection of performance) were exactly 1kg per day. I weigh cattle at intervals, depending on time availability, handiness to the yard and temperament of animals, but have stopped taking too much heed of short-term results. Over the years, I have discovered that several weeks of very high performance are often followed by a much slower growth spell, as individual animals compensate either way.

This should not be due to slower growth because of poor-quality grass swards, as I constantly try to make sure they have something tasty in front of them at all times. However, I wonder if compensatory growth could make up the shortfall after, say, a fortnight of low digestibility grass.

For example, one batch of quiet cattle beside the yard had been shifted off a field that I had forced them to eat down, and went into lush after-grass. They were weighed four weeks later and appeared to have gained 1.6kg per day.

After casually dropping this little statistic into every possible conversation, I got my comeuppance 40 days later, when the weighbridge claimed that DLWG had collapsed to less than 0.5kg.

Difference

As always, the 1kg average hides a big difference between cattle.

The poorest performer in the group achieved 0.72kg per day, and the winner managed 1.2kg.

I’ve been studying this stuff for decades now and, believe me, there isn’t much of a pattern to emerge. Certainly, conformation is just no indicator of an ability to pile on the weight, although it does make a difference when it comes to kill-out percentages.

And on that subject, the group average was 55.1%. They were weighed mid-morning off grass, so presumably this would have been higher had they been weighed empty.

Again, they varied widely and ranged from 51.6% (411kg R+3-) to 59.6% (449kg U+3=).

It goes without saying that the U grading bullock had a bit of style about him. If anyone doubts the merits of a higher killing out percentage, consider that the lighter bullock weighed 796kg on the hoof, and the heavier steer weighed 753kg.

Wise words

With another load nearly ready for selling, and the imminent arrival of some stores at the same time, I am reminded of some wise words from a farming neighbour.

During a conversation, I was stressing the importance in the beef business of the monetary gap between buying and selling. He stopped me mid-track, and told me to forget about that gap, and said it was less about buying to selling, and far more about selling and buying again. I’ve never forgotten that astute advice.