I was recently on a farm where the farmer had suckler cows and also purchased some store cattle.

He showed us a lovely pen of Charolais heifer calves that he had bought. They averaged £600 each. It was an impressive bunch of animals.

He is a part-time farmer and was wondering if he should keep more cows, or cut cow numbers and buy more stores.

All this got me thinking about my own situation.

I am now at 90 suckler cows and I was considering calving 100 next year.

I do benchmarking every year and have a good grasp of the cost of keeping a suckler cow. On this farm, it works out around £750 per head per year.

With this in mind, it’s hard to see the logic in keeping suckler cows. Would I not be better off just buying in some stores?

If you go to any weanling sales you will probably find that most calves are sold for less than £750, which means that their owners are effectively selling these animals at a loss. A very small amount of calves will make £800 to £850, which would be a small profit. But this doesn’t take into account any losses throughout the year.

If you were to average out the price for all suckler calves sold, and make an allowance for losses, then you would probably be at less than £600 per cow kept, or maybe even as low as £500. That’s a loss of over £150/cow and assuming you can keep your cow for £750.

I have no doubt that it will probably take a lot more than that to keep cows on farms that must make silage for an eight-month winter.

In this part of NI, an eight-month winter is a regular occurrence. It makes me wonder why most of the suckler cows are kept in the west of the country.

Count

Of course, lots of farmers will say that they can keep suckler cows for less than this, but do they really know how much it costs?

Do they count what the land is worth, either to own or lease?

Do they count all the housing that has had to be built for these cows?

Do they count all the dosing products, the meal, minerals, vaccines and all the other bits and pieces?

But the big one that everyone forgets is the time that we spend farming. I think that this is the big problem. We are prepared to work for nothing, or very little.

For example, there is one farmer that I do AI work for. He gets up at 5.30am every morning to do his farming before going to work, and then is out on the farm every evening until 9 or 10pm.

He got no second cut of silage this year, and his cows are housed since August. He is buying extra meal to stretch his silage.

He has some good calves and he gets some decent prices, but his average would be about £650 per live calf. He has quite a few losses, as you would expect from someone working away all day. The cost for him to keep suckler cows is in the region of £850.

You would wonder about the logic in this. But instead of reducing his cows, he is using AI on heifers with the aim to keep cow numbers up.

Good cow

As I write this, I am just back from inseminating a cow for a farmer that last calved exactly a year ago. He maintained that she was a good cow, although I thought to myself “she’d want to be”. She will need to produce a calf worth £1,500 the next time around just to break even.

I intend keeping my cows for now, but if they don’t have a calf every 365 days then they are gone. It’s hard enough to make money with suckler cows without carrying ones (no matter how good) that don’t calve every year.

We all need to know exactly how much it costs to keep each cow. The ones that don’t pay their way should be sold. In other words, get rid of the passengers.