From less than 150 days to an extreme of 540 days; that’s the difference in the time spent on the farm by the best and the worst of my dairy-bred steers to give the same margin between buying price and final factory return.

We have now sold pretty well all of our 2021 purchases, which were overwhelmingly spring born 2020 calves. The difference in profit is much more difficult to quantify, but is clearly huge.

In my view, there are two crucial factors at work.

The first is broadly outside my control but I have often referred to it. I have no knowledge around the genetic quality of the stock I am buying in.

As the poet William Thackeray put it “there is nothing like breeding in horses, dogs and men“. He could usefully have added cattle to his statement.

The second quandary is how much do I charge for the grazing period which all the animals go through? I depend on grass for the bulk of the weight gain.

An economist would say you have to charge the open market value if I were to rent out the land – say €250/acre per year, or do I charge what the actual cost is in fertiliser and general overheads?

And how should I allocate the overheads between the tillage side and grazing cattle?

Clear costs

But as well as the difficult costs of grazing, there are the much clearer costs of indoor feeding during the winter, and especially during the high inputs stage of the final finishing period when the costs are over €3/day.

The length of time spent in the house and especially the length of time spent on full finishing feed are two of the crucial determinants of final profit, or in the case of my 540 day bullock – loss.

But to get back to the genetics. As the main period for selling horses approaches, prospective buyers will be poring over catalogues giving not just the breeding but the actual performance of the sisters, brothers and parents of the animal coming up for sale.

Dairy farmers are provided even greater information through the EBI system. Access to genotype information on the beef side would help enormously. After all, the technology is there.