BETTER farm weaning efficiency league

The Irish suckler cow gets a hard time of it. She’s constantly labelled as being inefficient, too expensive to keep and ultimately condemned to having no future on an annual basis.

A former nominee for British Beef Farmer of the Year addressed this issue using a sentence that has stuck with me since.

“Sucklers are not inefficient, bad decisions cause inefficiency.”

In this phase of the BETTER farm programme, we have introduced more measurements of farm efficiency. We will quantify things like antibiotic use/kg of beef output, net euro earned per hour worked on the farm, farm cashflow levels and cow weaning efficiency.

What is weaning efficiency?

In many of the world’s big beef-producing regions, feed is scarce and climates are harsh. Cows need to be smaller and hardier to work in such environments, but by selecting for such an animal there is a risk that we are hitting output in our calf crop. Enter the weaning efficiency measure.

Weaning efficiency is the percentage of a suckler cow’s weight that she has produced via a calf 200 days into her lactation.

In terms of a cow weight, we take it mid-season (July/August) – she has had a chance to put on decent levels of condition after calving, but is not as fleshed up as she would typically be at housing time after a good grazing season.

The worldwide standard of excellence in this regard is seen as 50% – a 600kg cow (typical mature weights in North American Angus cows) with a 300kg calf at foot after 200 days.

Why use weaning efficiency here in Ireland – the climate, native feeds and even animals in these countries are hugely contrasting? The answer is simple; at the end of the day we are all in the business of converting feed to beef and, during the rearing phase, the beef cow is our middleman.

The typical Irish spring-calving suckler costs between €600 and €700 annually to maintain, with 65% of this being feed. It is important that a suckler cow justifies all of this feeding by producing a heavy calf for us each year and not just putting it all on her own back.

Table 1 ranks the spring-calving BETTER beef farmers on weaning efficiency. Sean Hayes of Clare has both the heaviest weanlings overall and the best weaning efficiency of 50%. Sean is passionate about breeding and uses a lot of AI, typically selecting continental sires. Limousin is his preferred cow type, though milk is hugely important.

Many think that by chasing weaning efficiency as a barometer, we will move towards smaller cows and plain calves. Sean is a living contradiction to this view. Show-quality calves litter his calf crop.

Case study – Padraig O’Connor

Padraig’s average cow weight in mid-lactation 2017 was 627kg.

His lightest cow is a 13-year-old Angus-Holstein-cross who was 442kg in mid-July and has given Padraig 11 calves. Her 2017 heifer calf was born on 5 March out of a Charolais stock bull. She achieved daily weight gain of 1.44kg to mid-July (226kg).

At the other end of the scale, Padriag’s heaviest cow is almost twice the weight of the light cow at 842kg. She is a seven-year-old Angus-Holstein-cross who is currently rearing her fifth calf – a Charolais bull by the same sire.

Her bull calf was born on 28 February and weighed 207kg in mid-July. This translated into a daily weight gain of 1.2kg.

If things continue, Padraig’s small cow will have a 328kg calf at 200 days – a whopping 74% of her mid-season body weight. The heavy cow will produce 286kg – 34% of her own body weight.

If both cows eat 2% of their liveweight each day, the heavy cow will eat 1.6t of extra grass dry matter during this 200-day period.

In grass alone, the heavier cow will cost Padraig over €110 to maintain between calving and weaning. Her financials will further suffer at weaning if her calf maintains current growth rates and tips the scales 40kg lighter than the light cow’s calf.

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