DEAR SIR, I was delighted to see Dexter cattle on the cover of last week’s Irish Farmers Journal (21/01/23), as they are becoming increasingly popular regarding sustainable farming and with the new ACRES.

I also read the article on the ICBF weanling performance report by Declan Marren, which gave a good understanding of how the report can be used for analysing animal performance.

As a land management student, doing my final year research project on the use of ICBF reports for Dexter cattle, I found the article extremely interesting.

I would like to point out that Dexters are a unique breed due to their size and temperament. Therefore, they have much lighter birth weights of calves and mature weights of cows in comparison to other typical beef breeds.

This means they do not have the same average weights and cannot achieve the set target weights that are suggested in the ICBF report.