The costs of starting a dairy-beef system

John Brosnan farms just outside Castleisland, Co Kerry, and he is one of the Thrive dairy calf-to-beef programme farmers. This year, he has purchased 24 beef-bred heifer calves from the dairy herd as part of the programme. The calves are a mixture of Hereford, Limousin and Belgian Blue and are all from AI sires, selected using the dairy-beef index as a guidance tool. While the sires are still easy-calving they have an increased focus on beef traits also. Sires of calves include Limousin bull EBY, Hereford bulls HE2376 and HE4105 and Belgian Blue bull DBZ.

The aim on the farm will be to bring the calves through to slaughter at approximately 20 months of age. This is John’s first year operating a dairy calf-to-beef system, after traditionally having sucklers and drystock on the farm.

“I suppose, initially, there was more work than I expected because I was probably not fully set-up for them,” John admits. “Filling water to heat was taking too long so I changed a few pipes around and got larger diameter pipes which really helped with the water pressure. This made the job much quicker.

“The cleaning every morning and evening, when you are feeding milk, can be time-consuming but it is work you know you are going to have to do so you can give yourself time.”

The 73ac farm is currently very lowly stocked with silage and hay both sold off the farm. John sees a dairy-beef system as a way of gradually building up numbers on the farm. Between 2008 and 2015, the farm ran a suckler herd.

However, with John working full-time off the farm balancing the unpredictability of sucklers became a challenge.

“It is difficult if you are working off-farm. If you have cows calving, you need to have somebody around the entire time. I was trying to do things right, keeping calving interval as tight as I could but it was still difficult to manage,” John said.

“There is still a workload with calves but it is more regular and you know what your day entails.”

Early days

Calves arrived on to the farm at an average age of three weeks old and within 24 hours of arrival received vaccinations for both coccidiosis and pneumonia, after consulting with his vet. Vaccinations were at a cost of €12.50/calf.

As this was John’s first year rearing calves, initial investment had to be made in equipment such as calf feeders and water heaters, which added to the costs of the system for year one. John already had a large round-roofed hay shed that was fitted with a windbreaker at one end and was suitable for holding calves. The total setup costs came to €1,186 with a breakdown of the costs shown in Table 1. John already had equipment such as calf troughs, hay racks, a de-horner and dehorning crate, etc, on the farm.

Calves were fed milk replacer twice a day, receiving an average of 2.1 bags or 42.5kg of milk replacer each at a cost of €90/calf during the milk feeding stage. They were weighed on 19 May and then turned out.

Any calves that were over 80kg were weaned gradually while calves below this were kept on the full feeding rate for another week.

At weighing, the majority of the calves were between 80kg and 100kg.

“It has gone very well during the first year. We had no real issues so far,” John said. “Calves are out at grass for a month now and are getting 1kg/day and the workload with them is minimal.

Excluding the setup costs, the cost of the system so far is working out at an average of €366 per calf. Breaking this down, average calf prices were €238, heavily influenced by the 10 Belgian Blue calves. This leaves variable costs at an average of €128 per calf to date.

If we look towards the summer months the main cost will be meal and any dosing that will be required.

Total costs should not work out at much more than €100 per calf to get to housing