The basic facts are reasonably clear. As the Irish dairy herd expands, an increasing proportion of the calves going for beef are coming from the dairy herd.

Listening to the Irish Farmers Journal podcast the other evening, my fears (or maybe prejudices) were confirmed when the highly respected Andrew Cromie of ICBF made the point that the average conformation and daily weight gain of male progeny from the dairy herd were actually disimproving. Dairy farmers will understandably pursue what is most profitable for their own enterprise. It is very clear that the cow going back in calf with easy calving and a short gestation period is the enterprise target.

Beef merit hardly comes into the reckoning and despite talk around the merits of a dairy beef index, progress in any meaningful way is painfully slow, or may, as Dr Cromie infers, actually be negative in a national sense.

At the same time, nobody pretends that the national suckler herd is going to increase and it may come under pressure to face a reduction in numbers, with some kind of individual producer buyout. The key question is, what can be done about the visible deterioration in the national beef sector’s performance? It is likely that the industry survives mainly because of the availability of grass on farms where costs are low and grass may well be regarded as free or almost free.

In that same podcast, it was acknowledged that in the dairy beef system, the cost of a second winter would be greater than the value of the liveweight gained.

This is not the case with suckler progeny, with much better conformation, weight gain, conversion efficiency and killout. It is unsettling to see an entire national industry being pushed down a spiral of ever decreasing efficiency. So what can be done about it?

Clearly, the development of a credible index for beef bulls to be used in the dairy herd should be an immediate priority, but to what effect? With the present type of dairy cow, it is apparent that we can only hope for marginal, incremental improvement. Steps could be taken to develop a national veal industry and there could be deliberate intervention to encourage the use of specific sires in the dairy herd. So far, we have nationally come up with no real strategy to deal with the Irish beef conundrum. Perhaps the problem will solve itself by the sector disappearing and exporting the problem to the veal units of the Netherlands. The other option is to forget about losing money by trying to get them to a certain finish, but simply have a policy of slaughtering them when they reach a liveweight of, for example, 580kg to 620kg.Which is, as I understand it, broadly the New Zealand approach. In other words, never mind trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but simply aim for the commodity mince market.