New Zealand’s Bob Thompson was in Wexford this week detailing the Kiwi dairy-beef production system at the Teagasc dairy-beef conference in conjunction with BSAS and ABP.

Bob was very complimentary of some of the Irish work in the fields of genetics, selection indices and the ongoing collaboration between Irish milk and meat factories.

New Zealand doesn’t have the industry link up between Fonterra and meat factories. Bob also detailed how they have close on two million Kiwi calves go down what they call a ‘Bobby’ calf route.

Mixed standards

The Bobby calf route means very young calves slaughtered at less than a month old. This beef is going to some of the same customers our meat factories are dealing with. Obviously one standard for New Zealand and another for Irish farmers.

Teagasc Grange researcher Nicky Byrne called out the margin from dairy-beef as a key determinant of keeping farmers rearing dairy-beef.

He said there is big turnover of farmers out of dairy-beef because of a number of issues.

He said the Teagasc Dairybeef500 programme needs to be Dairybeef1000 – meaning that farmers need to aim to make €1,000 gross margin to potentially have any profit left from dairy-beef.