Farmer Writes: first of the bought-in cattle killed

I killed the first batch of bought-in heifers last week and was very happy with the outcome.

These heifers would have been bought last February and March and the initial intention would have been to kill them off grass.

But because of the horrible grazing season that we’ve had, they had been housed for a while in June and again in August.

I still could have probably killed them off grass, but they just weren’t where I wanted them to be and with all indications pointing to a rising beef price, I decided to house and feed them for six to eight weeks.

Feed

All heifers were weighed in July and a batch of the heaviest were picked out to get a bit of meal at grass and these are the batch that have now been killed.

They were fed around 2kg from the end of July to the end of August, when they were housed.

They were then introduced on to red clover silage and the meal level was slowly increased.

I took about three weeks to build them up to 6kg of Inisleigh’s Hi-Maize coarse beef ration, which is a 42% maize mix and also includes barley, maize distillers, gluten and soya hulls.

They were fed for just under eight weeks and received 7kg of meal for the last week.

Age

The main incentive for deciding when to kill was age. One of the heifers was over 30 months and a couple more were coming close.

I didn’t want to start picking through them, so I decided to kill everything in this batch.

They were all nice gold Charolais heifers and although they had good weight and a nice cover, they were not going over fat and could have been fed for another while.

The heifers were weighed twice during the period and I was very pleasantly surprised by the weight gain of 1.5kg per day.

Performance

As the feeding period was quite short and not a huge amount of meal was actually fed, I was a little concerned that I would be disappointed in the kill-out performance, but, thankfully, I needn’t have worried.

Most of them averaged between 54% and 58%, but one thing that really hit home when I saw the kill sheet was the value of good-quality cattle.

One of the heifers graded a U+, the cold weight was 424kg and the kill-out was 62%.

There’s always an argument among farmers as to whether or not quality cattle are worth the money or do plainer or dairy cattle have the potential to leave more profit.

I’m not in a position to settle that argument just now, but all I can say is U grade cattle have serious potential to put on weight and kill-out.