This is a subscriber-only article
Each and every speaker at the Teagasc National Beef Conference touched on the importance of weighing stock in their presentations.
Session one chair, Dr Ed O’Riordan, asked for a show of hands as to how many in the audience weighed their stock, which proved to be less than 10%.
In the first presentation of the day, Dr Robert Prendiville showed that the difference between a calf growing at <0.7kg and >0.9kg daily during its first grazing season translated to €160 at slaughter.
Extra costs
He added that calves not hitting weight targets risked incurring extra feed costs, affecting potential profitability.
During his calf health talk, vet Martin Kavanagh stressed how crucial weight-measurement was for detecting illness in stock groups early.
Tipperary suckler producer, David Clarke then showed the audience how frequent calf-weighing was helping him to identify his most-productive dairy cows. Accurate birth weights were crucial to this – in 2016 David’s calf-birth weight ranged from 27kg to 67kg.
SHARING OPTIONS: