For almost 20 years I have been breeding all my own heifer replacements.

As I work with artificial insemination, this has involved breeding my cows and heifers to the best maternal genetics that I can get.

I now have three or four generations of maternal genetics in all my stock. Progress has been slow, but I feel that I am starting to reap some rewards from this policy.

Over the last seven or eight years I have been selling all my surplus heifers, guaranteed in-calf. I have been able to secure a small premium over the beef price, and have gained a lot of repeat customers.

It means the demand for these heifers has exceeded the number I have been able to produce.

As a result, I have been using sexed female semen to increase the number of potential heifers. This has worked reasonably well and I have more heifers born each year.

Customer

This spring I had a superb batch of in-calf heifers and a customer for them (or so I thought). He had bought heifers in previous years and told me that he wanted more this year.

As he was a repeat buyer, I was prepared to keep them for him, but he kept putting me off with different excuses and I turned away other potential customers while waiting. This went on for about four months, until I finally gave up.

I had a couple of farmer groups that came to visit, so I showed them the heifers and told them the story. Within a few days I had several phone calls about them, and within a few weeks had all the heifers sold. As it turned out, I could have sold more.

The whole experience has taught me a lesson, and I won’t be holding heifers for anyone again. It will be first-come, first-served.

Batch

I have another batch of heifers for sale at the moment. They are all guaranteed in-calf to easy-calving bulls and are vaccinated for BVD and leptospirosis. I have done all within my power to have them right for the next farmer, but is it enough? With so much doom and gloom in the beef industry at present, will I have any customers? Is anyone going to stay in sucklers? Every farming publication seems to be carrying bad news stories about sucklers. It has become fashionable to knock the industry and there seems to be a stampede away from keeping suckler cows. So it’s very easy to become very negative very quickly, but that’s not the way I operate. My fall-back plan, if I can’t sell the heifers, is to cull hard at my own cows and replace them with these heifers. It may seem harsh, but if I’m doing my job right the heifers will have better genetic potential than the cows.

Future

My own view on the suckler industry is that it does have a positive future, but there is no room for complacency. We must all have the very best cows we possibly can and this means changing the under-performer for something with improved genetic potential. If we look at pigs and poultry, do we really think that they are using the same foundation stock that they were five years ago? The same goes for dairy farmers – they are not sitting on their hands when it comes to making genetic improvement. If sucklers are going to survive then we must improve, and genetics is a good place to start.

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