Kay O'Sullivan January/February 2025
Breeding
- Spring Calving/Breeding
- Spring calving herd update
- Pre breeding management of cows
- Selecting bulls for the 2025 breeding season
Breeding
Kay operates an organic suckler to beef and sheep farm. The calving interval is excellent at 356days. 92% of the cows calved in 6 weeks and all heifers are calved as 2 year olds. The cows calve outside so cows need to calve unassisted and the calf must get up an suck straight away. The herd is mainly Angus bred to AI Angus sires. The cows are due to calve from the 13th March over a 10 week period. Cows are on grass and are currently receiving their pre calver mineral in the form of mollassed lick buckets, milk fever has never been an issue on the farm to date. For bull selection for 2025 two key traits to improve upon are carcass weight and milk. With this in mind a team of potential sires were selected for the herd. Calving ease was also important for the selection as well as health traits such as improving TB resistance.
For the 2025 breeding season the following table illustrates a potential bull team to use in order to improve on these traits:
Figure 1: Potential bull team for 2025 use
Performance
The slaughter reports for the heifers and steers for 2024 were as follows:
Heifers:
Figure 2: 2024 heifer slaughter report
Figure 3: 2024 steer slaughter report
Figure 4: Steers finishing on redstart in November 2024
The 22 weanlings were weighted before going on to the redstart crop. The average liveweight was 295kg ranging from 240 to 342kg. That’s giving an average daiky gain since birth of 0.85kg /day. These animals were last weight towards the end of august and averaged 211kg on the day. All weanlings received a mineral/trace element bolus before going onto the redstart. 4 bales of red clover silage is being fed to the weanlings each which is equivalent to each weanling receiving 4.6kg dm of red clover silage. The weanlings have 3 more weeks left grazing the redstart before it commences flowering and can become potential poisonous to stock.
Figure 5: 2024 born weanlings grazing regrowth
Grassland Management
Opening farm cover on the farm is 845kg dm/ha. The farm grew 11.5tonnes of dm/ha in 2024, which would mean that assuming 7 tonnes of grass grew from background nitrogen the clover swards fixed approx. 130kg of nitrogen/ha to grow the remaining 4.5 tonnes of grass dm.