Outlay of up to €240,000 on taking 100 cattle to finish this winter - Teagasc

Farmers finishing 100 store cattle out of the shed this winter are looking at an outlay of €200,000 to €240,000 between the initial price of the stock and the costs of taking them through to finish, new figures from Teagasc show.

Co-ordinator of Teagasc’s DairyBeef 500 programme Alan Dillon explained that the authority’s recently-released beef finishing budgets for 2024 expect finisher margins to remain “borderline the same” on last year’s budgets.

This is the result of some easing in silage costs off lower fertiliser prices, but a strong mart trade for store and weanling cattle, Dillon said.

“You are looking for your typical continental bullock for a breakeven price of around €5.87/kg, your early maturing-cross around €5.79/kg and your Friesian around €5.32/kg,” he commented to the Irish Farmers Journal at the National Ploughing Championships on Thursday.

“The thing that has changed this year is probably the inputs have dropped a bit. The cost of silage production has dropped a bit in terms of fertiliser, contractor costs are borderline the same and meal costs have dropped - that is one difference.

"I suppose what has gone up is the cost of the actual store itself, that is a little bit extra, which is good too in showing confidence in the market and that finishers have confidence to give extra for a store and hope that [the] beef price will rise a little bit.

“But there is still a big outlay here. For a typical system buying 100 cattle, you are talking anything from €200,000 to €240,000 of an input between the purchase cost and the input cost over the winter.”

Signs of confidence

Dillon stated that winter finishing remains “still a big risk”, but with beef prices “a lot stronger than they were last year”, with current quotes approximately 40c/kg over 2023’s prices.

“It should give us a bit of confidence in the market for the next number of months ahead. Hopefully, prices will continue to rise a bit once the autumn push is over.”

The dairy-beef co-ordinator advised farmers with spring-born weanlings on hand to assess their grass and fodder supplies when considering whether to sell or keep weanlings.

Creep feeding and vaccination should be strongly considered to keep weanlings’ performance in check, while the recent turnaround in weather in some parts of the country has opened up the possibility for extending grazing longer than was managed last year, Dillon added.

Irish Farmers Journal beef editor Adam Woods has broken the finishing budget costs and the price required to breakeven down into detail. Click here for more.

Read more

Over €6/kg required for winter finishers

Huge risk in winter finishing

More cuts of Irish Grass-Fed Beef expected to hit Italian shelves soon