BETTER farm scanning results: how do you compare?

With farmers across the country well and truly in winter mode, thoughts turn to next spring’s calving season. At this stage, most suckler farmers will have pregnancy-scanned their cows and dealt with or be in the process of dealing with any empty animals.

If this hasn’t yet happened, the wheels need to be put in motion now. We simply cannot afford to have our suckler cows out of their working clothes at any point. Last year, a full cow-cost breakdown on one of our most progressive spring-calving BETTER farms returned an annual cow-keep figure of €592 (before overheads/calf cost to weaning).

At present, one in five suckler cows calving in Ireland is doing so having slipped back a calving season. There is no doubt that one of the reasons behind this is that many farmers do not pregnancy-scan, hold females over the winter thinking they’re in calf, and then by the time they realise they’re empty the next breeding season is only weeks away, so another chance is given. It is management and decision-making like this that generally fuels the “suckler cow inefficiency” fire, as opposed to the cow’s own performance.

Below, our BETTER farms are divided into their respective regions and ranked based on scanning results. How do you compare?`

Scanning results for Connanct and Ulster spring-calving BETTER beef farms

Scanning results for Leinster spring-calving BETTER beef farms

Scanning results for Munster spring-calving BETTER beef farms

Around three-quarters of my cows are first-cross Limousins. The rest are continental. We don’t do anything groundbreaking. At present the dry cows are getting around 24kg of forage a day – 2kg of barley straw and the balance as 69% DMD grass silage.

I’d be a big believer in minerals. In the run-up to calving, I leave a pre-calver mineral in dust form in buckets along the feed face at all times. I find cows go mad for it in the first weeks that you give it.

Then, post-calving, they’re getting to good grass as soon as possible and I’ll have copper and fertility lick buckets out in the field before and during breeding.

At present, I’m calving 13 cows in three weeks from the middle of November. The balance are then calving in 10 weeks from early January. I plan to move toward complete spring calving. As I build towards a target of 50 cows, I’ll be doing AI at the beginning of the season as I only want to run one bull and want to maintain a tight spread.

My own CF52-sired Charolais bull went lame high in the leg towards the end of May. We brought in a replacement bull and he seemed to be working fine – I watched the first few cows he served and they didn’t repeat.

Then there were two periods a couple of weeks apart where I observed lots of repeats. As the date I had earmarked as the end of breeding approached, there were more repeats. Alarm bells started ringing and I got my vet to scan. There were 20 empty cows at that stage – the bull had been successfully serving handfuls of cows and, though still appearing active, not impregnating others.

It was almost like a cycle, as if he was taking days off. Not wanting to stretch my calving spread, I decided to cut my losses and pull him out a few days later. There were 11 empties in total. I sold four of the empty cows that were worth decent money, bought in some in-calf heifers to replenish my spring herd and put seven good cows that wouldn’t have set the mart alight into my autumn-calving herd.

It’s not the ideal scenario I know, but I have bred these cows myself. I know they’re good cows and I’m trying to build up numbers here. If I have cash in the spring I might pick up another couple of animals – I’m five short of my spring target now.

Most of these heifers originally came in from the autumn herd, though a good number will be calving at two years of age. This was to get numbers on the ground.

Going forward, we’ll be calving down everything at two here and won’t be moving animals between our autumn and spring herds.

The success was down to our Hereford bull, who came from Kilmallock two years ago. He ran with 20 heifers and six cows and all were in-calf in a nine-week period.

The winter before going to the bull the heifers would have got first-cut silage and 1.5kg of a high-protein nut.