Tom Bolger will calve 48 sucklers in spring 2018. His 39ha farm straddles a main road on the outskirts of Borris in Co Carlow. The land here is largely free-draining, though there are pockets of heavy ground. In the shoulders of the year, these are earmarked for Tom’s sheep flock, which has gradually been reduced to 90 ewes. These will lamb alongside the sucklers next spring.
Tom’s cow is a big, square continental. Indeed, he boasts the heaviest cows in phase three of the BETTER farm beef programme at 730kg (mid-season weight).
“I was surprised when I saw that we had the biggest cows here. Our progeny performance was good (200 day weight: 263kg), but when you divide this into the cow’s weight we came out bottom of the pile at 36%.
“You can also look at it another way though. These cows are so easy to maintain – I find it very hard to keep the condition off them. The ground here can take them too. For instance, we have our dry cows outside now and our weaned calves and beef stock in. There’s better power in silage and meal at the moment than in November grass,” Tom told me.
Boost
In 2016, the farm’s beef output and gross margin figures were 643kg/ha and €522/ha. Both of these need to be pushed via more stock, better animal performance and improved efficiency. However, Tom is reluctant to go beyond the 50-cow mark. His son Ian has an active involvement in running the farm, but also holds a full-time job as an engineer. While the sheep flock is reducing, the prospect of lambing 90 ewes during their suckler calving period cannot be taken lightly.
“On the advice of the BETTER farm team and my local adviser Hugh Mahon, we’re going from a store-selling system, with some heifer beef, to an across-the-board finishing farm. That’ll help with our output. Earlier this year I got seven of my own steers away at 406kg of carcase weight. They graded R+3= on average and were 26 months of age. There is scope to bring the age back, I think, with better feeding. We definitely have the breeding and I’d hope to get closer to 24 months with this year’s (2016-born) batch.
Listen to an interview with Tom in our podcast below:
Tom is also buying in stock to complement his own. Most of these are dairy-beef crosses with some reared on farm and some coming in as stores. A number of suckler-bred animals have been bought in as well.
This year, Tom has managed to get all of his beef cattle out in March and worked in two-day grazing allocations. Performance during the 2017 grazing season was exceptional.
Tom’s home-bred 2016-born steers weighed 571kg coming into the shed for fattening on 30 October (Table 1), having achieved weight gains of 1.19kg since late-summer.
Their bought-in counterparts (spring-2016 born) weighed 531kg. Of these 30 purchased cattle, 18 are first-cross beef animals from the dairy herd.
His 2017-born animals tipped the scales at 303kg on 30 October. Average age at that point was 7.8 months. Male calves, which were castrated in July, had grown at a rate of 1.16kg (341kg) and females 1.02kg (274kg) daily, from birth.
Silage quality
Samples from Tom’s first-cut returned 75% and 77% DMD, with 12.8% and 14% crude protein. Good silage is imperative on any beef farm growing or finishing stock. Too often we concern ourselves with concentrate rations and forget that silage will form 50% or more of feed inputs during a typical steer or heifer finishing period. While we can generally bank on the quality and feeding value of the concentrates that we feed, silage is the most variable feedstuff out there.
Engineering safety
Tom and Ian have introduced a number of clever farm safety measures on their holding. These include bonnet-mounted mirrors on their tractor for pulling out on to a road with no grassy verge or hard shoulder and bad cab visibility, home-made calving gates and a home-made dehorning crate.