The Wicklow way works for BETTER farm participants Minion brothers

Trevor and Andrew Minion run a 40-cow suckler to beef herd on 36ha of free-draining land near Wicklow town. There is diversity in the breeding herd with U grade 900kg Charolais goliaths mingling alongside petite Newford-type Aberdeen Angus cows.

Limousin is the sire of choice, with a Sympa bull having just completed is final breeding season, and AI sires ZAG, OZS, LM2321, LM2116 and LM 2117 popular.

Cows calve in 10 weeks from early February and progeny are brought to slaughter as bullocks at 25 months and non-replacement heifers at 24 months.

Cow performance monetised

The Minions’ land type and grassland management facilitate an early turnout. Beef stock generally gets out in February and cows go out as they calve, weather-permitting.

Trevor and Andrew resist the urge to graze everything to the clay in the back-end. Instead, they begin closing up their farm for the winter from mid-October. This ensures that the grass is there in the spring when they need it, at a crucial time for their cows.

The ideal scenario is to have a freshly calved cow on a rising plane of nutrition for as long as possible before she’s bred.

Many spring-calving herds fall down here, either having chewed up every blade of grass on the farm in the back-end, or harbouring a hesitancy to let cows and calves out for fear of ploughing up their land. And it shows – the average Irish suckler calves every 407 days.

While fertility is a heritable trait, albeit a lowly heritable one, management of suckler cows is the principle driver of reproductive efficiency. The Minions’ cows calve every 361 days.

The Minions’ 2016 bull and heifer calves are currently gaining 1.23kg and 1.03kg respectively each day. At these growth rates, selling live for €2.60 on 1 November, their calves return €73/head more than a herd operating from a 385-day calving internal and €135 more than the national average (Table 1).

Think spring now

“I remember the BETTER farm team telling me early on in the programme that I should be going out in February and I laughed at them – I thought there would be no grass and the land would be destroyed. But it works fine. In a bad spring, you just keep them moving on. If things really turn bad, they come back in,” Trevor said.

“But spring planning starts now. The farm’s grass needs to be built up so that there is enough to stay out into December and to have something there in the spring.

“Before joining the programme, we used to rip up all of the electric fences in September and let the cattle roam the whole farm until housing. The farm would be positively licked clean by housing.

“Now it feels odd. There are cows going in with what seems like plenty of grass on the farm. To be honest, I’m often tempted to buy some store lambs to eat it, but I have resisted thus far. The rewards are evident in the spring time.

“For one, we get to graze the silage ground early and still end up cutting in the last week of May. The quality kick that you get from that regime is brilliant. I’m disappointed if first-cut DMD is less than 75%.”

Teagasc work has shown that grazing first-cut silage ground prior to cutting significantly increases the crop’s DMD percentage, without major effects on yield.

Black and white

Twenty Friesian bull calves land on the farm every year, arriving in two groups either side of Christmas.

“We have a gentleman’s agreement with a neighbouring dairy farmer. It suits us as a means to boost output. They generally come here at around two to three weeks of age and we rear them.

“We wean at 12 to 14 weeks of age, which is probably a shade old. From then on, they’re out and run with the suckler herd. It’s a lovely, simple way of boosting output,” Trevor said.

The Minions’ suckler beef system is invariably simple and the bought-in dairy bulls complement it extremely well. They run with the suckler cows and calves in their first year and with the beef cattle once weaned.

Output is a big issue on the vast majority of Irish suckler farms – there isn’t enough going out the gate. But pushing output does not have to mean keeping more cows.

Dairy beef is an excellent way to lift a farm’s outgoings. The maturity of the calf coming in is at the discretion of the farmer. Obviously, a younger calf will cost very little, but he’ll need rearing – which isn’t for the faint-hearted. We can pay more for a stronger, reared animal, but this will eat into our bottom line.

The average carcase weight of the Minions’ Friesian bullocks is 360kg at 25 months of age. Bought-in dairy beef calves lead to an extra 7.2t of carcase beef going out the gate every year.

My advice would be to take little steps – before rearing 20 calves, rear five. Visit some calf-to-beef farms and learn from them. They will have made mistakes in the past – mistakes that you as a new dairy beef entrant needn’t make.

Trevor and Andrew have become very effective at using grass to drive animal performance on their farm.

Over the next few weeks, they will be starting to think about how they want to set up the farm for the spring of 2017.

They will identify what paddocks they want to graze next February and these will be closed up in rotation from mid-October onwards.

This is a simple action that allows beef farmers take advantage of the high feed value in spring grass.

The rearing of 20 Friesian calves generates extra output on the farm without creating an extra grazing group.

After the calves are reared, they are grazed with the suckler cows and their calves. This could be replicated on many suckler farms.

– Eoin Woulfe