Ger McSweeney March/April 2025
Breeding
- Spring calving herd
- Selecting bulls with high replacement index for breeding replacements
- Selecting suitable replacement heifers from within the herd
Performance
- Under 16month bull finishing and heifer finishing system
- Feeding regime for finishing animals
Breeding
Ger was our focus farmer for night two of the Future Beef programme breeding webinar. The focus of the webinar was as follows:
- Selecting cows for replacement
- Selecting the correct replacement sires for those cows
- Selecting the correct sires for finishers
- Myostatin (double muscle) and polled
Figure 1: Eurostar index for the herd
100% of the herd served to ai. Ger has finished calving and has already commenced ai for calving in early January. An aim for the herd is to finish calving before the ai season commences. The type of cow Ger wants requires plenty of milk to rear a calf, but not too much milk which may result in young calves being unable to completely suckle out the cow leading to problems with mastitis in the early spring period, idealy a pta of 8 or 9 kg of milk. Once the pta goes into the double figures Ger has problems with mastitis in early spring. The cow has to go back in calf each year and produce a calf per cow per year so when selecting bulls they must be negative pta for calving interval. Also a target for the herd is to use terminal bulls which will kill out with carcass weights greater than 400 kg. Terminal bulls which are selected cn have carcass weight ptas up to and around 34 to 40kg but they must be easy calving. The herd pta is 14kg for carcass weight this maybe increased by using high index replacement sires which are strong on carcass weight also. The most used breeds in the herd are currently Simmental (SI2152) and Limousin sires (LM9655, LM8259) for replacements, Charolais (CH4321, CH4159) sires for terminal sires and Angus sires (AA4089)for heifers with a high realibilty for calving ease. Another important trait is docility and cows must be docile so bulls must have a high docility pta. Figure 2 shows the team average required to breed suitable replacement heifers in 2026. A team of bulls should be chosen in order to deliver these traits. Using a team of 6 bulls will negate any changes to current evaluations and ensure a higher reliability for the given traits.
Another consideration which needs to be taken when deciding on the number of straws to use to breed replacements. Ger is suckling 40 cows so to maintain the herd approximately 20% of the herd needs to be replaced each year. So adequate numbers of high replacement index bulls must be selected in order to breed these animals:
- Ger wants 8 heifer calves to calve down
- 9 15 month old heifers will be required as 1 heifer may not go back in calf
- 10 new born heifer heifer calves are required as the national aver mortality rate for dead at birth and dead at 28 days old is 0.93% and 2.37% for suckler herds
- For 10 heifer calves and assuming 1 bull calf per heifer that is 10 bull calves also
- For 20 calves assuming a pregnancy rate of 60% that means 33 straws are required or approx. 4.1 straws per heifer required
Ger has looked at what traits are required by his bull team the next step is to look at the suckler cow report and match these bulls to the given cows for example:
Performance
The yearling heifers had been out on grass since early February but had to be housed again due to weather and poorer grass growth, suckler cows and calves were turned out to grass around the 20th of March. The farm has received 30 units of protected urea so with soil temperatures rising grass growth should take off. The bulls are well settled on their ad lib feed ration and should start being ready for slaughter from April. The bulls are on a high energy 14% crude protein bull finishing ration ad lib plus silage.
Photo 1 & 2 - 2024 born bulls on their finishing diet