Beef management: Early grass, calving issues and ICBF bull indexes

Grass: Farmers are reporting very good ground conditions especially in the south of the country. It’s been a great chance on some of these dryer farmers to empty tanks on dry fields and get the full value of slurry nutrients.

It has also meant that some lighter weanlings have been turned out in the south of the country. This reduces work around the yard, at an already busy time with calving and lambing, and also reduces costs through meal feeding and saves some silage.

While further north may still be a few weeks from turnout, it’s important to have a plan for when the weather does improve. Tailor this plan to your farm and try to push the boundaries a little.

The aim on dry farms is to have 40% of the grazing area grazed by 10 March and 100% grazed by 1 April. This changes to 20 March and 10 April on wetter farms. Don’t use the silage pit as the gauge to let cattle out and if silage is left over it will keep and may be needed later in spring if weather turns really bad.

Getting some fields grazed early will allow for slurry to be spread and also stimulate some growth. Protected urea should be in the yard at this stage and ready to be spread ½bag/ac once the weather improves and soil temperatures increase.

Dirty cows and calf scour: I was speaking to a vet during the week about cryptosporidium and its causes. He said he has concerns on some farms about the cleanliness of cows coming directly off slats for calving or some even calving on slats.

Faecal material ingested by the calf can greatly increase the incidence of cryptosporidium infection and can also increase the chances of Johne’s disease. If possible, try to move cows onto straw before calving and maybe feed dryer silage or hay to pre-calving cows to avoid hides and udders becoming very dirty.

Straw is expensive but an outbreak of cryptosporidium scour in a batch of calves will be a lot more expensive.

Calving records: Many farmers use the ICBF pocket notebook to record calving data. This can be very useful when it comes to culling consistent poor performers, udder problems, calving problems, docility issues etc. These issues can often be forgotten about once a cow and calf are turned out.

Some farmers will use a coloured tag for these animals for ease of identification later in the year. At current prices, you could have a cull cow replaced with an in-calf heifer for very little.

ICBF bull search: I’ve received a lot of calls over the last week on the fact that some breed societies are choosing not to print the genetic indexes on the bulls entered for their official society sales.

This doesn’t mean the bulls entered don’t have indexes. Many of these bulls will have good indexes that are suitable for the SCEP.

If you are going to one of these sales and need to buy a bull that is SCEP eligible, once you have a tag number, you can look up the indexes of the bulls on the ICBF animal search app on your phone or on the ICBF website.

Not all breed societies have elected to not publish genetic indexes in catalogues.