Robin Talbot: If the new BEEP is half as useful as the previous version, I’ll be delighted

Information from scheme showed showed a staggering gap of €400 between the progeny of the most efficient cows and those of the least efficient

Body of information: Robin Talbot feels that every calf born in the country should be genotyped. Photo: Alf Harvey

Robin Talbot

March 25 2021 08:27 AM

I welcome the launch of the new BEEP-S scheme. The information that came back to us from the previous version of this scheme was very useful and practical.

Take the ICBF Weanling Performance report. Based on our on-farm weighings of each cow and calf before weaning, it shows each cow’s efficiency, by comparing the weight of the calf (adjusted by age) to the cow’s weight.

The report also lists the five most efficient cows, and the five least efficient, for both bull and heifer calves.

I sat at the computer one night and drilled down into these figures. I looked at the bull calves born in 2019 and finished over the winter, at Under 16 months, meaning that they were all around the same age at slaughter.

What showed up is that the most efficient cows produced the calves with the highest daily weight gain, and those calves continued to perform at a high level throughout.

Those five cows had an average Replacement Index of €124. Their calves went on to finish at 460kg carcase weight on average, which brought them into €1,833.

Process

I went through the same process with the bottom five cows, which had a Replacement Index of €99. Their calves came into 369kg carcase weight, with brought them into €1,430.

This shows a staggering gap of €400 between the progeny of the most efficient cows and those of the least efficient.

Looking further at this information, it became clear that the most efficient cows were the earlier calvers and the least efficient were later calvers.

It confirmed something I have long felt to be the case: the less efficient cows tend to gravitate towards the end of the calving period.

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However, I have to say there are other elements of the BEEP scheme which I did not find as useful.

Faecal sampling was worth an additional €10 per cow up to 100 cows. Samples were sent to one of the approved labs, but the report that was sent back was too vague to be of any help in terms of aiding herd health.

As far as I’m concerned, that money would be far better spent being put towards a scheme for genotyping calves.

This is long overdue: every calf born in the country should be genotyped. Think of the body of information that would be built up in a few years!

The BVD sampling scheme, which seems to be in the end game, could instead now be rolled over into a genotyping programme.

The principle of tissue sampling of calves has now been established; instead of stopping it once BVD has been eradicated, we should be looking to see what else we can do with it.

Meanwhile, all our cows and bull calves have gone to grass, some of them since the start of the month. They have settled in well and look to be thriving.

Unfortunately, we have to hold in one batch of cows with heifer calves that are destined to go to an out-farm with a long roadway to the handling facilities, as we are due a TB reactor re-test in early April and it makes more sense not to turn them out until then.

We have made a change in management on the home farm. We had always grazed 50 cows with bull calves in a group, but they have now been divided into two groups. So we also divided all the paddocks in half.

The thinking behind this is that, as the bull calves got bigger and stronger, they just got too hard to handle in a large group, especially along the farm roadways.

Like any group of young lads (in normal times!), they’d be messing, pushing and shoving one another and, every now and again, a stake would break.

But our paddocks are still now of a size that they will be grazed out in three days or less, and there’s eight paddocks in the rotation.

All the winter cereals have been top-dressed with 4cwt per acre of 10-7-23 + 2.1 Sulphur, and look like they are ready to take off, given a bit of kindness.

We have a crop of hybrid seed barley. This is our first time to grow a six-row variety — we are trying to spread our options on our tillage enterprise.

If we can get good quality and yield plus the seed bonuses, it should work out well.

Hopefully, too, the straw will be more plentiful than last year. I can’t see us going for the option to chop straw. We are down now to our last few bales after scrupulous management over the winter.

The job of winter feeding is more satisfying when the cows and calves are knee-deep in fresh barley straw.

Robin Talbot farms in Ballacolla, Co Laois, in partnership with his mother Pam and wife Ann