The last of the beef cattle of 2013 were slaughtered on Tuesday. These steers have been housed for 50 days and were consuming 15kg of a coarse ration and 2 kg of grass silage. The ration was 10% crude protein and contained 80% cereals. All cattle on the farm at present are bedded on straw. This allows us to house cattle coming from grass without receiving any setbacks in performance.

In terms of our farming system these animals are the least profitable because of the large quantity of meal they have consumed in the finishing period (800kgs).We minimize the amount of cattle going back into the shed for finishing. Intensive indoor finishing leaves a questionable margin, unless large volumes of straights can be purchased or high quality home grown forage can be produced. Our finishing system is built around a grass based system with cattle going to grass from early March. 90% of the steers are killed off grass with 100kgs of concentrates fed per animal. This exploits our ability to grow large volumes of grass that can produce cheap kilos of gain. 99% of cattle we finished this year graded R/U. As we are in a finishing group this allows us to obtain a bonus. This bonus provides increased bottom line margin and helps increase overall profitability.