Assessing the potential to improve key profit drivers on beef farms

Dr Paul Crosson, Beef Enterprise Leader, Teagasc Grange, spoke about assessing the potential to improve key profit drivers on beef farms at the National Beef Conference 2022.

Beef cattle in Ireland are predominantly from spring-calving suckler beef and dairy herds where the objective is to align calving date with the commencement of the grazing season. The aim of these spring-calving systems is to take advantage of the relatively low production cost of grazed grass when compared to grass silage and concentrate ration. This is particularly important following calving when the energy demand for suckler and dairy cows increases substantially to meet lactation requirements.

Following calving, the aim of beef cattle production systems is to optimise progeny live weight performance over the animals’ lifetime while minimising the cost of feed provision. A further consideration for suckler beef systems is to optimise reproductive performance. This incorporates first-calving at close to 24-months of age, producing a calf approximately every 365 days and ensuring good suckler cow survival rates to minimise the cost of cow replacements. Age at first-calving in particular has very substantial implications for farm profitability with recent analysis indicating that delaying calving by 12 months (from 24 to 36 months of age) reduces net farm margins by approximately 75% (McGee et al., 2022).

Given the importance of these two efficiency measures to farm profitability, the objective of this article is to assess the recent trends and implications of: 1) beef progeny performance in respect of live weight gain and, 2) age at first-calving for suckler beef cows.

Summary

• Beef production in Ireland is based on the spring-born progeny of the suckler and dairy herds.
• Optimising live weight performance from birth-to-slaughter is a key objective and is associated with higher profitability.
• The beef farming sector has made good progress in increasing live weight performance in recent years, and related reductions in slaughter age evident for most categories of cattle, with further progress
• Feeding management, good herd health status and high-merit beef genetics are important enabling factors.
• The above factors also support a second key performance indicator for suckler beef production systems; age at first-calving.
• There has been no change in age at first-calving for suckler cows in Ireland in recent years; however, a higher number of cows first-calve at between 22 and 26 months of age than at any other four-month age range indicating that progress is possible.

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