Farmers looking to purchase calves in marts will be able to view the CBV (commercial beef value) of calves from next week as the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) mart tracker for CBV goes live.

Speaking at Dairy Day, ICBF service development manager Kevin Downing said: “This will allow a farmer to log in and see what the CBV of a calf is once it is checked into a mart and scanned through.

"Once a calf is genotyped, this information will be displayed, along with the lot numbers and date of birth.”

So far this year, 700,000 calves have been genotyped and parentage errors are currently running at 15% and where sires were unknown, this was an area that needs to be improved.

Along similar lines, he urged dairy farmers to pick better bulls and to keep an eye on the carcase sub-index of their dairy beef index (DBI).

“We are seeing more farmers looking for it, but we need to eliminate all those negative carcase weight bulls out of the system.”

Angus example

Using the example of the Angus breed, he said: "Taking bulls whose calving difficulty was 3% or less when it comes to the carcase weight index, there was 60kg of difference in carcase between worst and best bull on their DBI and that translates into €130 of a difference when they are killed out."

He added: “Farmers are paying too much for that lower CBV calf, as the return isn’t there in them."

The beef merit of calves coming from the dairy herd is a potential weak point, especially with concerns over the future of calf exports in mind, he said.

“Unless we address the issue here in developing a calf that is going to be more profitable and leave the rearer with money, we’re going to end up with the dairy farmers having to rear all their own calves.

"That is going to put huge pressure on farms that are currently stocked to the max in a lot of cases and it will be a major problem for the sector if no action is taken.”