Concentrate prices have dropped ahead of the winter 2024 feeding period, welcome news for beef finishers and any farmers feeding meal over the winter months.

Input costs have spiralled in recent years while output prices haven’t gone up by the same degree, so hopefully a stabilisation in meal costs will help winter finishers move closer towards making a margin in 2025

While concentrate feeding adds costs to any system, it’s an important part of making sure an animal hits its target weight gain especially over the winter months. We have seen on many occasions animals thriving very poorly over the winter months.

This poor performance can be down to a multitude of factors but in many cases it’s simply down to the diet

Suckler farmers in particular are not good at making high-quality silage and this in turn impacts performance, especially where weanlings are being fed during the winter months.

To change this the first step is to get your silage tested and see what the level of meal feeding should be to give you 0.6-0.7kg/day weight gain over the winter months.

If this means 2.5kg/ration/day, that means you feed it because if you don’t animals won’t thrive and this has a knock on effect on finishing age and costs at the back end of the finishing system.

Feeding a 300kg weanling 2.5kg or ration for 120 days is a lot cheaper than feeding a 500kg heifer 6kgs of ration and ad-lib silage this time next year.

This week we profile a visit to the Foyle Group finishing farm in Cookstown, Co Tyrone. It’s an impressive operation slaughtering 100-120 cattle a week. The big message I took from it was the simplicity of the operation with diet being number one.

Health management was also top class and the attention to detail is paying off with cattle doing 1.8kg/day while on the unit.

One of the big take home messages I got from the visit was that the group isn’t afraid to try new things to increase its animal performance.

Feed bunk scoring is one of these new technologies. It sounds complicated but in essence, it’s just a way of making sure you are feeding animals to appetite and meeting their requirements for high weight gain.

It also eliminates feed waste which ticks the sustainability box as well. We also take a look at ration ingredients and what you should be looking for in your ration this winter.