24 March 2025
Maximising Beef without Compromising on Calving
Beef from the dairy herd makes up nearly 66% of the national kill in Ireland. This proportion will likely increase in the future. Stuart Childs, Teagasc Dairy Specialist, and Dan O’Riordan, ICBF, explain how farmers can balance easy calving with strong beef traits, getting the best of both worlds.
Dairy farmer’s bull choices will have significant influence on the performance of the dairy beef finishers as performance, grade and weight can be strongly influenced by choosing the right genetics.
Dairy farmers have the right go for easy calving sires as the last thing any dairy farmer wants in seasonal calving is calving difficulty making an already hectic time of year even more pressurised. However, you quite literally can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to dairy beef bull selection and there are not too many situations in life when one can say that is the case.
How? Using the Dairy Beef Index (DBI) to select bulls for dairy beef matings.
DBI is made up of 3 elements:
- Calving (31%)
- Beef (62%)
- Carbon (7%)
As has been the case with EBI in the last 20 years, focusing on a particular trait alone runs the risk of leaving something else behind and this is true of DBI. If we focus only on the calving difficulty piece, we can get easy calving but little or no beef merit. Equally, if we focus too much on the beef, we could end up with significant calving difficulty. So a measured approach is advised.
Select a calving difficulty figure that you are comfortable handling and look to MAXIMISE the beef index of the bull at that given calving difficulty. It is important that at a given calving difficulty, there can be significant range in terms of carcass weight and conformation.
- Bull 1 €166 DBI made up of €39 Calving €121 Beef; Carcass Weight 16kg, Carcass Conformation 1
- Bull 2 €165 DBI made up of €50 Calving €106 Beef; Carcass Weight 8kg, Carcass Conformation 0.74
Both bulls have the same expected calving difficulty at 2.9% but will produce very different calves.
Dairy farmers need to conscious that they can significantly influence the beef merit of the calf on the ground without compromising on their requirement for calving ease.
Role of Sire Advice
For even further reassurance in relation to calving difficulty, farmers using the ICBF Sire Advice Programme have the added comfort of knowing that the programme actively works to avoid putting a difficult calving beef sire on a cow or heifer that is genetically predisposed to having a difficult calving. The programme does this by factoring in the females ability to calve (pelvic width).
Therefore, dairy farmers should use DBI to select the beef bulls that they want to use this breeding season examining both the calving and beef characteristics of the chosen bulls with the view to maximising the beef merit at their chosen calving difficulty acceptability level.
Using the ICBF Sire Advice Programme will further protect farmers from calving difficulty concerns by using the genetic information on both the cow and the bull to avoid matings that are likely to result in calving difficulty.
More information on the Dairy Beef Sire Advice
Breeding Week 2025
Monday 24th March – Tuesday 1st April
The breeding season on Irish dairy farms has become increasingly concentrated in the late April to June period. The purpose of Breeding Week is to provide timely reminders to farmers on important genetic and technical issues underpinning a successful dairy breeding season.
Details of the events taking place throughout Breeding Week