New venture into rearing dairy-beef calves

A disappointing result from last year’s artificial insemination (AI) programme has created a ripple effect, with those waves resulting in several changes on the cattle front.

Firstly, we have taken a long, hard look at how we might improve conception rates in heifers and it has also triggered a first-ever attempt at calf rearing on this farm. This is due to the knock-on consequence of fewer dairy replacements from the sexed semen used to produce replacement stock.

The plan is to have the heifers on more of an even nutritional plane in the weeks before, during, and after insemination.

With the programme taking place around mid-May, the likes of last year’s weather resulted in them being anything but close to settled during this period. So, to try and maintain this balance in their diet, we will continue to feed a small amount of concentrate after they go to grass.

This, coupled with small tweaks to the nine-day programme, may or may not see an uplift in numbers that hold to AI.

Gains

Early signs are encouraging, with daily liveweight gains from late December until mid-March averaging 0.75kg.

This is the highest store performance I’ve ever achieved (despite a mediocre fodder analysis), with ad-lib silage plus 1.5kg of a blended ration being offered. It makes me, once again, question the correlation between analysis of bales and how livestock perform.

They were fed silage that had a metabolisable energy (ME) of 9.8, and repeated years of disappointing results told me to expect about 0.3 to 0.4kg of daily weight gain.

Certainly, the commonly held, and frequently spoken belief about those useless wee New Zealand-type cattle having no growth potential has been blown out of the water.

I used to buy quality continental stores (500kg), and they rarely managed 0.5kg daily on a similar regime. Interesting, eh?

However, the real excitement around our yard these days centres on our maiden venture into calf rearing.

Initial phase

Of course, we rear the dairy heifers, but they are off milk before they arrive here so that initial phase is something we know nothing about. No, this is an attempt to rear a batch of male calves to follow on from the 12 we bought as weanlings last year.

With free pens in the lambing shed, and availability of a hot water supply and plenty of fresh straw, it seemed like a splendid idea.

Having a recently retired wife on hand 24/7 may or may not have had a bearing on my thought process too.

Susan has been in charge of rearing 25 pet lambs and the way she cared for them (some might argue utterly spoiled them) suggests these wee Hereford boys will be kept in the lap of luxury.

Examples of the sort of things that now occur in the lamb-rearing pen are the sudden appearance of ‘toys’ such as wooden boxes and straw bales. Apparently, the lambs were bored and ‘needed’ something to entertain them. Changed times indeed.

Healthy

It’s too early for me to offer much of an opinion, but the first few days have shown encouraging signs on every front. The calves are healthy, we are doing everything by the book, and they seem to like us as much as we like them.

Certainly, a pen of near-identical black whitehead week-olds lying in a heavy bed of barley straw is a heartsome sight.

They all came from the farm we rear the heifers for, so hopefully this will be beneficial for disease control and overall management. They were £260 per head, I am reliably told it’ll take at least another £100 to see them off milk, and after that the input figures will continue to mount up.

At this stage I don’t really want to speculate on potential profitability (or lack of it).

There is a palpable buzz around this new venture, and I would hate to spoil it by delving too deeply into financial forecasting.