Joe and Harry Lalor are farming full-time on their family farm just outside Ballacolla, Co Laois.

They are the county’s representatives in the Teagasc/Irish Farmers Journal BETTER farm beef challenge.

The farm's system consists of a 115-cow spring-calving suckler herd and a mid-season lambing flock of 225 ewes and 90 ewe lambs.

Eighty-two hectares of mainly free-draining grassland are apportioned to the cattle enterprise. A further 30ha are for the sheep.

All cattle on the farm are finished. What would have traditionally been a steer-beef farm has transitioned to a bull-beef farm.

Heifers are also slaughtered from 20 to 24 months.

Progress

In 2014, the herd consisted of only 83 cows. That’s a 30-cow increase in five years to 115.

Impressively, as cow numbers have gone up, so too has the herd's replacement index.

The new ICBF five-year trend report for the Lalor’s farm shows that the replacement index for mature cows has jumped from €83 in 2014 to €101 in 2018.

Furthermore, this brings the herd into the top 10% within the country.

Looking at replacement heifers, the trend is similar.

What was €91 in 2014 has since climbed to €107 in 2018, this time just €8 below the top 10%.

Other key performance indicators to improve have been calving interval (376 days down to 367 days) and the percentage of heifers calved between 22 and 26 months (0% up to 90%).

Calving commenced in early March, with 15 out of 115 calved as of Friday 8 March.

Calving

Calving commenced in early March, with 15 out of 115 calved as of Friday 8 March.

The bulk of calving takes place in March and April to alleviate pressure on housing.

“March is often a bad month weather-wise, so leaving it closer to April gives us a better chance of getting newborn calves out quickly”, Harry said.

To find out how calving is going so far this spring, as well as how conditions in 2018 affected the farm, see this week’s Irish Farmers Journal in print and online.