NISBP: Derek Dunn, Donemana, Co Tyrone

Derek Dunn, Donemana, Co Tyrone

All cattle are now well settled onto winter feeding. With the earliest stock now housed over eight weeks, I have been dosing cattle for fluke, worms and lice.

There are lots of different combinations available to treat these parasites, as well as separate fluke, worm and lice treatments. I am using a combination pour-on product (Closomectin), which should cover all parasites. I am using this eight weeks post housing to ensure maximum kill of liver fluke.

Although mature cattle should have built up good immunity to the effects of worms, I think it is worthwhile to kill any present at this stage of the year.

This may not improve the performance of mature cows but it will prevent any latent worms being carried over and shed at grass next spring, which would increase the burden on young calves.

This product also kills lice, but I have found that any lice product I have ever used merely decreases the infection level rather than completely eradicating the problem.

Hopefully, this will be a shorter winter than last year and one lice treatment will do. However, if cattle are licking again before turnout they will be treated with a specific pour-on to control both sucking and biting lice.

Last winter, I took faecal samples from cattle that were just not performing as I would have expected. High levels of rumen fluke showed up.

The general consensus seemed to suggest that this should not have had a significant impact on performance if all other parasites were controlled and nutrition was adequate.

I decided to dose using Zanil which contains oxyclozanide and found animal performance to improve afterwards. This year, I have again taken faecal samples and cattle showing burdens of rumen fluke are being treated.

I do not really see the point in not dosing where rumen fluke is shown to be present as this will help to reduce pasture contamination next spring and further build-up of infestation.

I have found faecal egg sampling to be very effective in diagnosing specific parasitic problems, but also as a good way of testing if the treatments I have used are actually working.

It has also helped to show some cases where treatments were not necessary, but in the past would have been carried out routinely when there was no need, so there is a cost saving to be made also.

I have a weighbridge in the cattle crush which aids the accuracy of dosing. In the past, I would have dosed to what I thought was the heaviest animal in the batch to ensure complete control. The weighbridge does not lie and can often throw up a few surprises.

At dosing, I weighed all spring-born calves for the second time since housing. After weaning at grass, they continued to achieve an average daily liveweight gain from grass of just over 0.9kg/day.

Since housing, some pneumonia issues have checked performance back to 0.7kg/day which is still fine for heifers but not for some of the spring-born continental bull calves, which I intend finishing out of the house in May/June.

I have separated all Aberdeen Angus-bred males which will be kept over as steers. Bulls are now being built up onto a finishing diet.

Last year, I kept 17 Aberdeen Angus-bred males as steers and have been killing these over the past month. They have averaged 341kg carcase weight at 20 months after 60 to 80 days of feeding 6kg/day of concentrates.

Considering these were mainly heifers’ calves, I am pleased with them and will continue to use the Angus on spring calving cows in the future for steer finishing.

After much thought, I made the decision last autumn to reduce my spring herd and start a dairying enterprise in spring 2014.

Rather than converting completely to dairying straight away, I am converting one of the beef houses and intend building up gradually to 60 to 70 milk cows in 2014.

After removing cull cows from the spring herd, I sold a selection of the in-calf cows privately which has left me with 25 suckler cows and 30 in-calf suckler heifers to calve down this spring.

I am retaining the autumn herd as these cows normally graze the rougher areas of the farm. The bulls were removed from these cows at the end of December after a 12-week bulling period.

If scanning goes well, I should still have approximately 100 autumn cows calving down next August and September.

I am taking soil analysis this week on fields not sampled over the past three years to give some direction on slurry, fertilizer and lime requirements.