I was fortunate enough to receive a Nuffield Ireland scholarship in 2013. I focused my study on suckler cows and what can be done to improve the sector, particularly farm income levels. As part of the scholarship, I had the opportunity to travel abroad.

Given that beef and sheep production has the most amount of farmers and uses three quarters of the area farmed, New Zealand was a must see. They focus on cow functionality; docility, ease of calving and fertility.

Two of the farms I visited in New Zealand had purchased farms on the back of drystock production and another was beginning the purchasing process. Two things enabled this. They used the existing resources they had as best as possible and to do this they kept it simple. As boring as these might seem, they are the two most relative recommendations to the Irish beef sector.

Those two principles have the potential to increase the share a farmer receives from the €2.27bn that beef contributes to the Irish economy. It is a farmer’s own choice if they want to improve their management to increase their access to some of that money.

An efficient suckler cow is a cow that calves unassisted, weans a calf 40% to 50% of her bodyweight and returns in-calf with minimal inputs.To simplify that message further, the cow you need on your farm calves, weans a calf and is back in-calf a close as possible to within one year. It doesn’t sound too scientific, or maybe it sounds too simplistic, but that’s all that’s needed.

The general rule of thumb used is the bigger cows need to wean at least 40% of their body weight and smaller cows closer to 50%.

Since 2013, I have weighed all cows and calves around weaning time. This weighing is my form of milk recording. I choose this time to weigh the cows because they have their work almost completed in terms of calf rearing and they are generally halfway through pregnancy. I divide the total calf liveweight by the total cow liveweight at weaning.

You might be wondering why I draw this extra work on myself. Well, I want a better handle on what type of cow I want on the farm. I want one that can perform with grass as the main part of the diet, with straw used as gut fill later in the pregnancy.More importantly, I want that cow to generate a sale to justify her position on the farm.

The table below shows two of the stand-out cows weighed in the herd.

The larger animal has since been culled, while the lighter one is a heifer that calved at 24 months.

In terms of maintaining them, I would be able to run three of the smaller cows for every two of the larger ones. It takes almost the same amount of feed to maintain the 1,792kg of two big cows or 1,812kg of three smaller cows. If you’re selling weanlings, what scenario would you prefer? Two or three calves to sell from the same cost base?

Given there is only 30c to 40c difference, should we be looking at having younger herds of smaller cows and culling off the less efficient mature animals? It’s something to give serious consideration to at least.